For fifty years we've been moving data to where the computing power is. With intercloud computing, the world is going to look quite different, with the computing power moving to where the data is. The intercloud turns computing inside out. With traditional IT, we move the data to where the computing infrastructure is located. With the data volumes in most application areas now growing exponentially, this IT model is now broken. Moving massive volumes of data around means more bandwidth, more storage, and more latency.read more

Virtualization offers quite a few advantages for customers running large data centers but care needs to be taken when using memory replication technologies like DataGrids. The particular problem here is that each virtual machine looks like a real server as far as middleware running within that virtual machine. Each virtual machine has its own IP address for example. If you are keeping a primary copy and a backup copy of critical data in a DataGrid then it's essential that those copies have a fe...

Adding the BladeEngine, a unified Ethernet and iSCSI network controller to its PRIMERGY Blade Servers, Fujitsu Siemens Computers introduced advanced support for fully-virtualized datacenter environments. PRIMERGY BX600 series Server Blades, designed for the Dynamic Data Center, are systems offering the ServerEngines dual-capability 10 Gbit Ethernet and iSCSI SAN controller qualified for full virtualization operations - such as allocating networking and storage bandwidth to individual virtual machines in VMware and Xen environments.

As virtualization platform vendors strengthen and expand the feature sets of their respective offerings, it is almost a certainty that the data center in the future will include a heterogeneous mix of virtualization platforms as well as physical platforms. For organizations that are moving to virtualization, choosing the correct platform for their needs is only the start. For certain, organizations also will need to obtain a set of virtualization utilities to assist in moving to, and managing one or more virtual platforms in their data centers.

Vendors forgo competition, for now, to help agencies make the move to IPv6.

Microsoft launches unified software aimed at streamlining workplace communications and reducing the cost of the average corporate VOIP system by one-half.

Channel partners will bundle LeftHand's virtual SAN appliance with VMware licenses for an ESX infrastructure that can run on one piece of physical hardware.

As I have blogged about before, Cisco has very nice Solution Reference Network Designs (SRND) for many common (and some not so common) network designs. These are superb best practice guidelines when developing complex network solutions.