Systems and app management

IT's new age of possibility

It's only been around about 50 years, but information technology has already affected almost the entire landscape of human activity. How science is pursued, how products are designed, how commerce and supply chains work, how businesses are run, how human beings communicate with one another--there's almost no arena in which IT isn't a critical enabler.

Given this, it may sound peevish to say IT has, at the same time, been hide-bound and conventional. But IT has been conventional. Oh, sure. We've had our moments--modernizing supply chains starting in the 1970s, the PC and distributed computing blooms … Read more

IT's new sheriff: The Open Data Center Alliance

This week, the Open Data Center Alliance announced itself. Yet another industry association? I hear you yawning already. Don't nod off, though. Within two years, the ODCA is likely to be the most important, powerful, and useful industry association in information technology. How is that possible?

The association is creating a culture of sharing between global IT leaders, allowing them to learn from each other and cooperatively influence tens to hundreds of billions of dollars worth of annual IT procurements. That is a wow-worthy new world order.

It's true that IT is already chock-a-block with industry associations. We … Read more

IBM's reorg shows shape of IT to come

I'm always wary of analyzing corporate organizations and reporting structures. They change frequently--every year or two, in some companies--so they're always in flux. And the details of who reports to whom, or what they want to call this business unit or that--those things matter, a bit, but not nearly so much as the products and services a company offers, how it goes to market, who its competitors are, and so on. Finally, company structures are very "inside baseball"--the kind of detailed who's-on-first, who's-warming-up-in-the-bullpen information that industry insiders may find interesting, but that isn'… Read more

'Cloud' means something important

"Cloud computing" is so overused and overhyped that it doesn't really mean anything anymore. It's has become kind of a vague "what comes next in IT" label, with no specific meaning, applied indiscriminately to whatever the latest vendor to stop by wants to sell us today.

I now hear this complaint with great regularity--but I don't entirely agree. Sure, every vendor is eagerly "cloud washing" whatever products or initiatives they have to fit in with the latest buzzhype. And the "cloud" term is thrown around with pretty reckless abandon. … Read more

Use the tools that make the job easier

Google recently published data showing that the character encoding used on the Web is dramatically shifting towards the Unicode standard. It also discussed its strategy of up-leveling data it finds in dozens of competing character encodings into the Unicode standard, then processing everything in Unicode. This is a great example of the philosophy:

Use tools that make the job easy.

When you narrow the field to data formats and structures, you can make the rule a bit more specific:

Use data formats that are easy to process.Convert to and from those formats, if and as necessary.

And for good … Read more

Why we can't have nice security

I know this is TLDR fodder of the highest order, but I'd like to read to you from a press release--for a security product, even. Here it goes:

The entire line of Spyrus Hydra PC USB encryption drives are invulnerable to such attacks because no password authentication values or keys are ever stored on Hydra PC devices after logoff or removal. Unlike any competing USB encryption drive, the Hydra PC reconstitutes a Master Key Encryption Key at logon using a FIPS-approved Key Derivation Function which utilizes, at a minimum, an Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) public/private key pair … Read more

2010 will be a wild ride for IT

This year is going to be amazingly full of change in IT. "Ennnh, IT sees a lot of change every year," you say? Yes, fine and true. But not like this one. Not at this magnitude. Consider:

Virtualization is being taken up at such a pace that it's hard to find a metaphor to describe it. "Exploding" has a pieces-coming-apart-at-high-speed vibe, when in fact virtualization's pieces are all coming together. "Imploding" doesn't work either. We've had maybe five years of fast growth, but now it's mainstream and ready for … Read more

Apps and ops don't meet--but they will

My CNET column is called Apps Meet Ops for a reason. It's about the time and place where the creative, development side of IT meets the disciplined, operational side of IT.

This isn't to say that there isn't discipline in development, or that there's no creativity in operations. But the gestalt of the apps world is about creating new functionality; writing software that embodies new or updated business logic; making things. The gestalt of the ops side is about building and running infrastructure; managing logistics; keeping things up and running smoothly; operating things. The two zones … Read more