Wednesday Links

Too many stories -- too little time to comment.

Some of these are on the current Wall Street situation (hard to avoid that topic recently).  On a side note to that -- I am building my own stock index for data center companies.  Google Spreadsheet makes this amazingly easy.  I want to get a full week of data before blogging about it though, so more on Monday....

Wednesday Links:

• GigaOm: Sequoia Capital Rings the Alarm Bell: Silicon Valley is in Trouble.   I especially liked the comment near the bottom -- "Start-ups will have to start developing legitimate business plans and actually execute upon their strategy to monetize.  How Horrible.  This is good for tech, not bad".

• Forbes.com -- Tech Earnings Loom

• New York Times - Venture Capitalists are Hearing Footsteps.

• Stratus Technologies Survey: 20% of businesses with Business Continuity Plans have no idea if they will actually work.

• Veritas Cluster Server One -- Symantec Delivers new High Availability Disaster Recovery platform

• Terremark to provide core infrastructure solutions to WiMAX

• Eleven things you didn't know about EMC

• IBM Creates new data center certification

• Sun Microsystems recognized by EPA for surpassing agressive greenhouse gas emissions goal.

whew!

Symantec State of the Data Center Report 2007

Last Tuesday Symantec (SYMC) announced the release of their 2007 State of the Data Center Report. The international study surveyed managers of Global 2000 and other large companies. The magazines, web sites and company white papers are constantly full of industry statistics and trend monitoring, but I think this report did a nice job of doing the legwork necessary to get real data from those facing the issues in the data center today and presenting it in a clear and concise manner. I think one sentence in the paper summarizes the main point nicely:

Essentially, data center managers are being asked to deliver more high-quality services in an increasingly complicated environment, yet their budgets are relatively flat. As a result, data center managers find they adopt cost containment strategies that make use of new technologies, including virtualization, and new management approaches, such as those that automate routine processes.

Here are some of the highlights that I gleamed from reading the report:

• Of the five issues (of factors impacting today's Data Centers) I think #2 and #5 are the big ones (in my mind). #2 is staffing and #5 is Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity Planning. Staffing has been noted several times in the press and is obviously becoming a large issue that managers must deal with.
  

• Better preparedness for a disaster now versus two years ago was listed by 53% of the repsondents. When thinking of locations for your DR and BCP plans, don't forget my Site Selection white paper.
  

• Not surprising, the always fun statistic proved true once again for a cause of downtime. Twenty-eight percent of respondents listed "change or human error"as a chief reason for downtime. Although some stories have down played ITIL, I think for this reason alone you will see an increased usage of the ITIL guidelines in data centers. This obviously plays into the staffing issues raised as well.
  

• The report has good information on virtualization plans. I think it will be interesting to see how Microsoft fits into this market in the near future. I don't believe they will pose a serious threat to VMWare, but will most likely balance out the market a little more and have a decent percentage. VMWare was the top product listed in the U.S. but almost half of Asia-Pacific respondents are using Microsoft virtualization, with only 35% going to VMWare. I haven't finished watching it yet, but here is a video of Eric Traut from Microsoft, presenting on Microsoft's virtualization technologies (it also mentions Windows 7).
  

• The outsourcing statistics were interesting. Fourty-two percent of U.S. managers said they utilize outsourcing, while 61% of non-U.S. organizations are. "Among the most common tasks outsourced by both U.S. and non-U.S. organizations are server maintenance, backups, storage management, archiving, and business continuity."
  

This is, overall, a very good report and worth the read. Check out the press release here

Virtualization: I'm OK, You're OK

With all of the hype around virtualization, I couldn't resist another post. A few items I've found while surfing lately have really peaked my interest.

The first one is well over my head, but extremely cool. It's a year old, but I imagine some of the concepts still apply (or have been revised/improved/tweaked). It's called Hardware Virtualization Rootkits, from Dino A. Dai Zovi and can found here. If you are in to security at all, this guy does some insane research.

The second one I ran across was from a favorite blogger of mine - Christofer Hoff. It's a presentation on Virtualization and Network Security. It's an excellent mix of Virtualization concepts, vulnerabilities and solutions from his former company, Crossbeam. Check out the blog post here and presentation here.

The final is a presentation entitled The Virtualized Rootkit is Dead from Matasano, Symantec and RootLabs. It discusses HVM malware, virtualized malware detection and the Samsara framework. (Dino Dai Zovi is on the Matasono team)