Blogs: Virtualization

Urs Hölzle gets excited. Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) announces new cloud stuff. The huge ad broker wants to compete better with Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS/EC2. Among the highlights: New pricing, shared instances, replicated NoSQL, and PHP. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers sort out the details.

This IT pilot fish has just finished a very painful year converting his users to virtual desktops -- and resistance to change isn't the only problem.

The New York Times is getting criticism over its data center series. Beginning the series with a 2006 anecdote about a near server meltdown at Facebook, three processor generations ago, was not an auspicious beginning.

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Server 2012 is now available. Redmond is touting it as the first cloud operating system, offering better virtualization and remote manageability than do Linux and UNIX. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers wonder if that's simply hyperbole, or if there's a grain of truth behind the marketing message. Not to mention: Fukushima Unit 4 Cover Up?..

This company needs a new server for testing software. The boss's budget-friendly solution: Clone one of the application servers and convert it for use as a virtual server.

IBM (NASDAQ:IBM) proudly announces its latest big, blue baby, the zEnterprise EC12 mainframe. Yes, Virginia, it's still totally relevant in today's great green, virtualized, consumerized, cloud-computing paradise -- or so IBM says: You decide! In IT Blogwatch, bloggers help us decide.

The mainframe will soon be just another part of IBM's cloud-based disaster recovery service offering, allowing the enterprise to effectively create a backup data center in the cloud, says IBM distinguished engineer and CTO Richard Cocchiara.

VMware (NYSE:VMW) is buying Nicira for $1.26 billion. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers wonder what the future holds for open-source software-defined networking and cloud-computing generally.

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is crowing about its super-fast, SSD-backed, hi1.4xlarge AWS EC2 instance type. Its full name is quite a mouthful: High I/O Quadruple Extra Large, but Amazon claims it can achieve 120,000 IOPS. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers scrape together $3.10 to try it for an hour.

This is serious business: EMC (NYSE:EMC) and VMware (NYSE:VMW) are said to be spinning off their cloud computing assets into a new company. Those will include the Cloud Foundry PaaS, Greenplum, Chorus, DynamicOps, and the Project Rubicon IaaS, we're told. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers wonder if it could be true. And Paul Maritz may be the guy to run it [Update: or not!]