Many meanings to many people.  In its humble beginnings at IBM, it allowed companies to utilize expensive mainframes by running numerous applications at the same time under a single hardware footprint.  With the introduction of IBM's AIX (Unix) Environment, we see the use of similar technology but on smaller, less costly hardware.  Pretty soon, the use of virtualization becomes status quo for those environments.  Other companies in the Unix world begin to try and follow suit (i.e., Hewlett Packard and SUN).   During all of this breakthrough technology, PC servers continue to proliferate and soon become a major issue in datacenters due to the sheer numbers and the cost to run them.   Flash forward to 1998.  A small company is founded to provide virtualization technology to the In...

Part 1: Every disaster is a reminder that businesses rely too heavily on data and IT systems that are not adequately protected.  Disasters occurring somewhere else in the world, provides an opportunity for businesses to re-assess their vulnerability. Similarly, disasters that occur to a business present an opportunity for natural selection to weed out the unprepared.  If you are an IT manager or CIO with an inadequate business continuity (BC) infrastructure and recovery plan, your survival is as likely as the lame gazelle at the back of the herd.  Disaster will run up from behind you and take you out. Sound cruel?  Maybe, but since I personally experienced the lioness ripping flesh from my frame, I have a leg to stand on (hmmm, bad analogy and idiom mix) when I tell you that an IT d...

I just spent the week assisting with the install of IBM's GPFS and Cluster NFS (CNFS) on RedHat 5.2 Linux. We created a 30TB filesystem to store large digital media using GPFS running on multiple x3850 and x3650 servers. This allowed multiple GPFS clients to simultaneously share the filesystem. CNFS was configured to support server the digital media over standard NFS to the multiple DCP-2000 Digital Cinema Servers with high availability and security. Quick and easy failover. Low costs Intel Servers, RedHat, and SATA disks combined to create a high performance and highly scalable filesystem (up to 2PB). Let me know if anyone is looking to create large shared filesystems that can support direct SAN Block level access, NFS, or CIFS.

2008 proved to be a very challenging year for the world as a whole for the first time in decades. Every industry felt the repercussions of the financial meltdown in the form of lower revenue growth, reductions in labor force, and consequently, a reduction in their spend for Information Technology. However, I believe, that IT should be viewed not as a cost center, but as a driver for competitive advantage. Many of my customers look to the IT teams to perform data mining to deliver information to marketing and to executives to allow them to "steer the ship" into the right areas that can effectively help drive new avenues for revenue, as well as ideas and solutions for cost containment through areas such as virtualization. What value would the delivery of a new business solution give you i...