IT Could Benefit from Being More Social
It’s Friday and that’s kind of a social day where you go out with friends after work or look forward to a weekend of social activities, and that got me thinking that perhaps it’s time for IT to be a bit more social too. Enterprise 2.0 social software could help. In fact, Mike Vizard has a post this week on IT Edge about a new social software package designed specifically for IT pros. That’s fine as far as it goes, if you all you wanted to do was communicate and collaborate with your fellow IT pros, but what about when you want to communicate with folks outside the...
read moreBig Data is Truly Transforming the Enterprise
Among the many trends slamming into IT today is the idea of Big Data, and while it is no doubt the buzzword of the day, there is definitely something happening around the idea of using data to understand your business better. A couple of weeks ago I spoke to MIT professor Andrew McAfee about this notion of big data. McAfee is best known for being the guy who coined the term Enterprise 2.0, the idea of bringing social tools into the enterprise. He is currently principal research scientist at MIT’s Center for Digital Busines and recently wrote a book called Race Against the Machine with...
read moreFacebook Develops Tools to Keep Up with Monster Monitoring Tasks
You probably think you have a challenge when it comes to monitoring your systems, and you probably do, but chances are your tasks are minuscule when compared to what Facebook’s IT pros have to deal with. Today, I learned about some tools Facebook’s developers created in-house to keep up with its gigantic monitoring task. For Facebook, and for many companies faced with the blessing and curse of so much data, Facebook could usually tell when something was amiss, but they couldn’t tell why. It’s a data problem that many large companies face — even if it...
read moreBuilding a Greener Data Center Makes Good Business Sense
When it comes to running a Data Center, what are your biggest costs? Chances are, it’s heating and cooling and keeping the lights on. Since you aren’t likely to start running your own electricity generating plant, there are many steps you can take to control the cost of heating and cooling your data center — and if it saves you money why wouldn’t you do it? I’ve often said companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo! are exploring green technologies to run their massive data centers, not so much because they care about the environment — although they might...
read moreWhen IaaS Won’t Cut It
When I was at CeBIT 2011, I remember hearing a speaker who talked about how easy it was in today’s world to start a business. He had a slide with a picture of someone using a laptop on an empty beach — the image being you could come up with an idea anywhere and get started. With just a credit card, you could have immediate access to infrastructure services. It’s a golden age for entrepreneurs — except when that vision doesn’t work. For many businesses having access to services like Amazon EC2 gives them an instant scalable data center that starts off inexpensive...
read moreZynga shows how to build a hybrid cloud
When it comes to building a hybrid cloud, just ask game maker Zynga how it’s done. That’s because Zynga, like many start-ups, started out as an Amazon EC2 customer, but as it grew it recognized it would need to build out its own data center too. Yet instead of giving up EC2, Zynga opted for a hybrid approach and has solved many of the issues that may be concerning you about going in a similar direction — but is Zynga’s experience applicable to all companies? Networkworld recently interviewed Zynga CTO Allan Leinwand to find out what it took to pull off a hybrid cloud...
read moreFree Real User Monitoring
This blog is sponsored by Correlsense,
the maker of SharePath RUM Express -
a free tool that provides a real-time
view into the actual experience of
your end-user, including availability,
response times and service levels.
