Containers, Clouds and Rumors

There has certainly been a lot of news in the industry this week and although I haven't completely caught up yet (I'm attempting to take vacation this week), here is a quick run-down of what I have seen so far.....

• First and foremost, my apologies for getting some figures wrong in my Systems Management News article. I said that Microsoft has 220 containers and 30,000 servers ; well, let's just say I need to stop writing articles so late at night. :) Going back to my own post of the AFCOM keynote that Michael Manos gave, at 1000 to 2000 systems per container it is more like 300,000 servers total.
  

• Containers were a hot story today, as HP announced the POD (Performance Optimized Datacenter).
  

• There were a couple of good articles on Cloud Computing I ran across. The first one, from Douglas Gourlay at Cisco is a nice wrap-up of the hype-filled term and how it is really just a technology shift that is happening across many layers and industries. I agree that the term cloud doesn't really mean much today -- I think we'll look back in a few years and realize that things were really just getting moving in terms of true Cloud Computing. He mentions workload portability, which I have been intrigued with for a while and was why I followed Platespin, who was acquired by Novell back in February. Doug's mention of the fictional Skynet made me realize that Cisco is so good that aiming for clouds isn't enough - they are into outter space newtorking!

• Another Cisco story this week is the press release about enhancements to IP over DWDM. I am still (somewhere in my spare time) trying to pursue my CCDA certification and DWDM technology is well..... pretty cool stuff. You should read the press release for yourself, but the main news is that they have doubled the reach of the CRS-1 40Gbps IPoDWDM to an industry leading 2,000 kilometers without regeneration.

• The second cloud computing article was very interesting -- for some rumors! Reuven Cohen from Enomoly gossips about project "Red Dog" from Microsoft. I remember reading about this before (because of the Clifford the Big Red Dog reference). It's basically saying that this project is meant to be an "EC2 for Windows" cloud offering. The second rumor is that of a Chinese cloud project "under a hydro dam", which when complete may exceed a million servers. For whatever reason, my hunch is that Sun is involved in this.

That's all for now -- I've upgrade my Ipod Touch to version 2.0, so I am having fun with the AppStore. I'm still bummed that the National League lost the all-star game, but excited that next year it will be in St. Louis!!