Links List 7.11.08

July 11th, 2008 by Julia Lim

The big news this week is of course Diane Greene’s surprising ousting as CEO of virtualization giant VMware. There was a lot of speculation about the reasoning behind this decision – from stock prices dropping for VMware and parent EMC to fighting Microsoft with Microsoft (new CEO Paul Maritz is an old MS exec) to tensions between VMware and EMC (communications, culture, tie-in to EMC storage/sales) to a possible cloud computing future for VMware that Maritz is better positioned to drive.

But in the end, it seems like Tucci didn’t have faith that Greene had the chops to run the successfully growing company anymore. So she could build it to the stature it has now but just as MS comes out of the gates, all of a sudden she’s no good? Boy, I can’t wait for Greene’s book on this. CEOs, take heed – don’t be too successful or the board will fire you. (Or alternatively don’t let the guy who doesn’t like you stack the board!)

So where does VMware go from here? Rachel Chalmers, Research Director for Infrastructure Management at The 451 Group, places a bet on cloud computing – saying that VMware plans to offer a new suite of cloud computing at the next VMworld Conference. And here’s a nice piece on the Burton Group’s Data Center Strategies Blog that suggests another multi-pronged winning strategy.

Oh no. The virtualization management space, if it didn’t before, is beginning to remind me of the Internet boom time when everyone and their brother (literally, ask me about it sometime) got into the act. Introducing, DynamicOps and their product, Virtual Resource Manager (VRM). The two-week old company and product are spinouts from Credit Suisse, where the original solution was home-grown and in production for more than 2 years, managing thousands of virtual machines. I’m really interested in taking a closer look at it and seeing just what VRM does differently to meet the unique requirements of virtualization management at such a scale.

Forrester Research released a research report on “the Five Essential Metrics for Managing IT.” The study relates the “Operational Health” metric to the measuring of IT failures. Dave will be happy to note that the report uses one of his favorite phrases – talking about the “dial-tone reliability of IT services”.

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