As recently as five years ago, business continuity and disaster-recovery topics would make IT executives in small to midsize enterprises grumble that neither was affordable. Now companies of all sizes are realizing they can have both using virtualization technology.

iPhones are becoming a standard in the enterprise. And with the the iPhones, we are seeing a number of applications for a variety of different uses. The latest is an application for security managers made by Cisco. The application alerts managers to threats in the enterprise so they may respond in real-tme to incidents that merit attention. It's now available in the iTunes store. Sponsor

Compellent, Dell, HP, Pillar Data, and roll-your-own Pillar/DataCore bring strong storage management features to XenServer, VMware, and Hyper-V environments

There's no question that cloud-computing infrastructures will become a significant part the IT plans of large corporations, according to analysts. The question, at least right now, is how well those hybrid internal/external infrastructures will be managed.

Don't be confused. Virtualization and emulation aren't the same thing. Here we sort out the differences.

Was in Singapore this last week and was talking with the VMware SEs and Cisco SEs there – sharing best practices, tools, and “dos and don’ts”.   There was an interesting discussion/whiteboard around the topic of storage network design around FC/FCoE (though this applies to iSCSI as well).   The Cisco folks made some really interesting analogies with VoIP and TP “micro-bursting” that I thought were awesome and I wanted to share.

Cloud Computing: Web-Based Applications That Change the Way You Work and Collaborate Online by Michael Miller is an excellent introduction to this phenomenon within the software industry. Written using a style that takes the reader on a gentle journey through a "brief history of computing," explaining where we have been and why we'll be living and working in the clouds in our future, the book is an excellent introduction.read more

Dell's new machines are distinguished by extensively scalable RAM, substantial network I/O, and embedded virtualization software options that simplify setup. Here's how their virtualization-optimized servers stack up.

Fortisphere announced that Network World Magazine, one of the networking industry's premier publications, selected Fortisphere Virtual Essentials(TM) as one of its top 10 "Must Have Virtualization Tools." The Fortisphere Virtual Essentials product suite was selected for its policy-based management solutions that enable enterprises to track and control their virtualized infrastructures. ...

Detailed product review of vmSight, a performance and access management solution for virtualized desktops on the VMware, Citrix Xen and soon Microsoft Hyper-V platforms. ...