The hidden costs of cloud computing. There is always lots of buzz around Google Apps availability and the tradeoffs versus Microsoft Office. TwinStrata throws out an interesting analysis, built from real infrastructure metrics.

In part 1 of this post I talked about emerging cloud technologies, and how one management technology built for the cloud paradigm is at play in bringing cloud-like capabilities to your infrastructure. Pressing on with this theme, one more example helps paint the picture of what cloud really is, and why much of the baggage we get mired in (the hoopla about standardization) should be tossed out with the bathwater.

Chatter on about the pros and the cons of the cloud as we might, you're seeing vendors demonstrate every day how the fundamental concept of cloud is changing how you will compute tomorrow. This is part one of a two part post.

We are surrounded by buzz about security in the cloud, and James Niccolai at CW gets the story right - the cloud might be better than your data center.

Whether you're a service provider, an application architect, or an end user, the cloud is still pretty cloudy. But we've already moved on to talking about standards. Is it too early, an impossible goal, or a productive conversation? The thing is, the cloud is changing how we do business. The cloud will change how we do standardization as well.

Hey you Cleversafe folks, I really want you sitting in a box on my desk (well not you personally, but a storage box). Or on the shelf at Fry's Electronics. Yes, it's Friday, and I'm being irreverent, but where's my $89.99 scalable Cleversafe device? Have you been paying attention to what Cleversafe might just be capable of?

Sun posted a huge revenue loss, but discarding an unusual write-off, were things bad or not? Rain or shine, the Sun's still there.

In response to a comment - can the cloud ever provide you with enough security? I anticipate it will eventually have more security, and more in other capabilities, than any infrastructure you've built for yourself today.

I agree, the cloud is vague, but we're talking about a set of technologies that you need to understand. What's makes a cloud? It's a matter of what you're enabling a set of compute and storage services to do for some set of users.

Steven Vaughan-Nichols recently threw down with Andrew Keen in his post "An idiot's view of open source." Kudos for Steven. I think he's spot on, but only touched on part of the story. OSS is the ultimate free market sustaining toolset, and we shouldn't recognize it as less than such.

Keep the fat out of your virtual infrastructure! Of all the technologies likely to optimize your capital costs alongside server virtualization, thin provisioning is probably the most significant (depending on the scale of your virtual infrastructure). But thin provisioning isn't available everywhere, and you should be thinking about what you're buying when you get a solution that does thin.

There are a whole slew of issues surrounding storage for server virtualization environments, but one stands out - data protection. If you're not taking your DP approach outside the traditional box you've likely lived in with DP, then you're probably missing opportunities. That means you might be wasting space, missing your protection goals, or just building a data monster that your infrastructure can't grow with.

If the end days are coming to your ability to spend on infrastructure projects, you better prepare to manage what you have better - it might be a matter of keeping your milk cow alive or letting it starve.

HP's de-dupe technology announcement this week (previously leaked a bit), seems to have largely been glossed over. But it's a momentous occasion for the big guys to be busting out their development cycles for the sake of de-dupe, and suggests there's more to come.

One more uh-oh on the security oopsie-daisy list. Think this suggests our thinking is a little messed up about how we secure data?