Infrastructure convergence – the two sides of the coin

Let’s be fair – IT isn’t the only industry fraught with jargon, but it can certainly hold its head up high among the leaders of the field in terms of gobbledygook. The minefield of acronyms we all have to suffer is worsened by the astonishingly bad practice of overloading individual, sometimes quite innocuous words and [...]

Virtualisation and security – the two-edged sword

All new innovations in IT are a double edged sword – with the benefits come challenges and unintended consequences. Not least server virtualisation, which does have a number of security advantages over running software directly on servers. While it’s worth considering these, it’s also worth weighing them up against the challenges, particularly given the relative [...]

Virtualisation – The State of Play

I presented this at an IBM-hosted event a couple of weeks ago. Enjoy.

Why Sun Microsystems makes me angry

It’s not often in this job that I feel genuinely cross about an industry situation, but I find that’s the case with Sun Microsystems. before I start I should declare my hand – I used to run a Sun environment of a few tens of servers and a few hundred workstations. When I say “I [...]

Microsoft Bloat, Green and the Vista opportunity

Microsoft’s always going to have a hard time presenting a convincing green story for desktop computing. Its not that the story itself is un-sound: power-saving features are useful as far as they go, and Microsoft as a company is keen to be a good corporate citizen. The elephant in the room however may be summed [...]

Goodbye dual boot, hello virtualisation

I confess, I nearly did away with Linux last week. Something was consistently going wrong and for the life of me I couldn’t work out what – the result was that, at far-too-regular intervals, my machine was hanging/locking/freezing. At first I took it as it came (good moment to sit back and stave off the [...]

Why I’ve replaced Vista with Linux

This decision was a long time coming but I think it is the right thing to do right now: I have reformatted the hard drive on my laptop and replaced Vista with the latest version of Ubuntu Linux, as the main operating system. I did this for a number of reasons: it’s probably worth going [...]