Virtualization

Virtualization of the data center is provoking fundamental questions about the proper place for network security services. Will they simply disappear into the One True Cloud, dutifully following applications as they vMotion about the computing ether? Will they remain as a set of modular appliances physically separate from the server computing blob? Should everything be virtualized because it can be?

CIO.com's Bernard Golden recently explored the advantages of private clouds. This week, he looks at the downsides.

Confused about what your business can gain from private clouds? CIO.com's Bernard Golden shares practical advice on the main advantages of this flavor of cloud computing.

CIO.com's Bernard Golden explores the four key functions and services that must be in place for business application groups to take advantage of cloud computing: agile provisioning, application management, scalability and chargeback.

VMware recently weighed in with its definition of private clouds. CIO.com cloud guru Bernard Golden explains his definition -- and his assessment of how IT groups can benefit from this arrangement.

Two recent cloud computing conferences show innovative cloud computing management tools -- and an awful lot of IT skepticism. Get comfy with SaaS, folks. That's where software vendors are innovating.

While the report is interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it demonstrates how big picture strategy firms view cloud computing, it glosses over a number of issues, with ambiguous calculations and comparisons, argues CIO.com blogger Bernard Golden.

Nick Carr sees cloud's potential -- but while it's tempting to forecast The End of Computing, it's unlikely that IT development will stop at Amazon-hosted centralized computing, Bernard Golden argues.

Traditional business intelligence solutions can't scale to the degree necessary in today's data environment. One solution getting a lot of attention recently: Hadoop, an open-source product inspired by Google's search architecture.

Can cloud providers achieve economies of scale that preclude almost any organization's data center from being cost-competitive? Doing the math on one real-life example, a Microsoft data center, gets pretty interesting.