Links List 9.3.09

September 4th, 2009 by Valerie Barber

Some interesting stats from VMworld, attended by 12,488 people this week in San Francisco. In addition to announcing vCloud Express - a new “fast and cheap” cloud enablement service,  the show data center had 37,248 virtual machines running on 776 physical servers (there were some  technical issues during some hands-on labs). Concerns about performance remains one of the primary concerns limiting widespread adoption of virtualization, according to a survey of attendees – 70% are virtualizing less than half of their business-critical applications. And yes, Microsoft had a small booth as a result of last week’s dust-up that they say prohibited them from showing competing technology.

While the US Justice Department has approved Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, the EU Commission has launched its own investigation make sure customers in the server market are not faced with reduced choice or higher prices as a result of the acquisition. This could delay the deal by up to five months. Gartner analyst Andy Butler believes that the delay will be detrimental to Sun and its customers due to the uncertainty of which products will continue. Referring to HP and IBM, he writes:

“They can now be even more aggressive about targeting Sun’s install base and take advantage of the fact that they will represent a safer investment strategy for new projects,” he said.

 Gmail’s 100 minute outage this week caused a lot of stir – besides millions of users not being able to access their accounts, there was talk of reliability of cloud apps and whether they’re ready for prime time. Apparently, engineers took down a few servers for maintenance and underestimated the effects. Gmail’s reputation is definitely taking a hit, but how do you measure the impact in dollars? A recent study shows that manual configuration errors resulting in web application downtime can cost up to $72,000 and can wreak havoc on one area of IT that garners much investment of budget dollars. According to the results, the average company spends $852,187 per year on personnel costs to create, maintain and support deployment scripts and dedicates 11 or more employees to the ongoing configuration, installation and deployment of Web applications. Analysts cite the frequency of manual transcription errors that occur when staff manually changes deployment scripts.

“The constant need to modify customer-facing applications, combined with the complex configuration requirements of Web servers, requires a heavy workload. IT management needs to have more predictable processes for managing Web application changes to avoid unexpected downtime.”

Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz & Associates

 

It’s been a pretty quiet week – most likely due to the reality that the last official summer holiday is here. So to start the weekend on a light note, I wasn’t suprised when I read that a recent survey confirms what you probably thought about Twitter: 40% of tweets are pointless babble, 38% are conversational and just 9% have pass-along value. But if there were no Twitter, there would be no more Twitter Tracker. Oh yeahhhhh!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Add comment September 4th, 2009