Links List 4.3.09

April 3rd, 2009 by Julia Lim

(Photo – from Padre’s box at Hot Stage. Padre is the unofficial Roman Catholic priest of InteropNet.  Note to everyone – Don’t mess with Padre.)

We’re just over a month from Interop and InteropNet is starting to shape up. It’s amazing to see this massive testament to interoperability and next-generation networking get built literally from the ground up, disassembled, moved to a new location, reassembled, then broken down…only to be completely recreated three months later on the opposite coast. Keep your eyes glued to our blog, as our team at Hot Stage will be giving updates on the process very soon.

If Monday’s Tech Bisnow is any indication, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra is down but definitely not out. He’s holding true to his plans for improving government IT agility and transparency, lighting a fire under GSA when it took nine hours to add a new emblem to Recovery.gov. But how much can he really get done when he’s still out on administrative leave while the FBI follows up on its investigation in to the corruption in his old DC CTO offices?

The Open Cloud Manifesto became (officially) public this week to some fanfare. The loose agreement of cloud vendors aims to put together a core set of principles for the cloud computing community, but there is definitely some dissent in the ranks, with some disgruntled vendors, i.e., Microsoft, going so far as to call it an embarrasing attempt to rally the industry around interoperability. 

This commitment to open standards is great, but what does it mean when two of the major cloud players – Amazon and Microsoft – haven’t signed on. IDC thinks that they’re abstaining for the obvious reason of IT vendor rivalry. Not to mention Microsoft’s perpetual “not invented here” syndrome.

And in the world of obvious generalities, cloud computing is continuing to grow – see John Foley’s post on Cloud Services (or Whatever) to Surpass $56 Billion This Year (John Foley is funny). Gartner puts the cloud services market at $46 billion last year, jumping to $56 billion this year and $150 billion by 2013.

Is the cloud safe enough for government use? This is the $1 trillion dollar question. Amazon and Microsoft boast that cloud storage saves money and makes government more efficient. Whether or not it’s currently safe for the government is one thing, but we definitely know that there is some interest, even if the agency definition of the cloud is still hazy

For all of you embracing virtualization to cut costs and get more out of your server capacity, Mike Vizard writes about The Trouble with Virtualization. “So what looks like a great innovation in terms of increasing the usefulness of a server, turns out to be a catalyst for upgrading servers as more and more virtual machines get introduced to a physical server.” Despite the hype, this had to occur to data center operators embarking on server consolidation projects. Obviously the more load you put on a server, virtual or not, the sooner it has to be replaced. Here’s some more food for thought - what are the real green IT savings when it comes to virtualization? Sure you have fewer servers, fewer power supplies, etc – but what really happens to power and cooling costs when you load up more virtual machines on the same servers? These are hot topics for data center managers because over the lifetime of a server, power and cooling costs far outstrip the cost of the machine.

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