The Problem With ‘Net Neutrality’ – WSJ.com

I couldn’t agree more with Bret:

Broadband has been a rare bright spot in the economy. Why discourage new investment?

Citrix XenApp Announcements This Week

Citrix made a series of announcements this week about XenApp and I spent some time with Scott Miller, Business Development Director for Virtualization at World Wide Technology (WWT) to gain his perspective.  Scott was formerly President of Server Centric Consulting which WWT acquired in July.

Scott, first of all, welcome on board to WWT.  It’s been over a month since the acquisition and it’s been fantastic seeing the interest and excitement about Server Centric joining forces with WWT.

I know that you have worked with Citrix for many years and have seen many product announcements from them.  What’s so important about this one?

World Wide Technology and Cisco’s Smart Grid Announcement

World Wide Technology (WWT) was included as one of the ecosystem partners in Cisco’s Global Ecosystem Partners Smart Grid announcement last week.     Steve Benvenuto—Cisco’s Director of Emerging Technologies and New Markets, does a good job summarizing in his blog post: What You Need to Know About Cisco’s Smart Grid Partner Ecosystem – Channels .

I thought I’d take a moment to tell you about WWT’s participation in this ecosystem but before I begin here’s some background on “The Grid.”

Network Neutrality in the News

New developments are in the works regarding Net Neutrality. The WSJ reports:

The U.S. government plans to propose broad new rules Monday that would force Internet providers to treat all Web traffic equally, seeking to give consumers greater freedom to use their computers or cellphones to

VDI: Adding No. 8 to Gartner’s Seven Ways to Save in the Data Center

A couple of months ago Gartner outlined Seven Practical Ways to Save Costs in the Data Center.

1. Rationalize the Hardware
2. Consolidate Data Center Sites
3. Manage Energy and Facilities Costs
4. Renegotiate Contracts
5. Manage the People Costs
6. Sweat the Assets
7. Virtualization

The list makes sense and all of them are timeless in terms of

WWT Acquires Server Centric Consulting

While I was on vacation last week (and I can’t believe I missed VMWORLD!) we announced the acquisition of Server Centric Consulting.   The full press announcement is located here and there’s been several articles in the bus pubs.

10 Things to Know about the Cisco Nexus 1000V

I managed to corral three of our senior consulting services engineers, Dave Harrison, Mike Jennings & Kent Noyes, and ask them about the Nexus 1000V.  (All three are CCIEs and Dave/Kent have VCPs to boot.)

Dave, to start, what is the Nexus 1000V?

DAVE: Here’s the product marketing answer from Cisco, which is pretty good.

“The Nexus 1000V switch is a pure software implementation of a Cisco Nexus switch. It resides on a server and integrates with the hypervisor to deliver VN-Link (Cisco VN-Link: Virtualization-Aware Networking) virtual machine-aware network services.”

To boil it all down, the Nexus 1000V gives the network admin visibility and control of the traffic traveling inside the virtual world of VMware.

Bob: Does that mean the network admin didn’t have “visibility and control” before?

Padmasree on Cloud Computing: User Experience and Trust

I’ve been following Padmasree Warrior, Cisco CTO, in her blogging and tweets for the past several months.  She is fantastic in her ability to articulate Cisco’s technology vision and roadmap.  It’s no wonder she’s one of the most followed people on twitter.

In a recent post, Cisco Point of View on Cloud Computing – The Platform , I thought Padmasree’s follow-up comments to her original post captured 2 critical issues surrounding cloud computing:

1. User Experience; and
2. Trust

While seemingly coming from opposite ends in the value process, end-user & IT, these two elements of “user experience” and “trust”  in a Cloud Computing strategy, in fact, go hand-in-hand.

2 Sides of the VDI Coin

Steve Chambers has been writing some interesting posts with perspectives on unified computing, virtualization, and, perhaps most importantly, on his efforts in driving IT from “good2great.”

In his latest, Steve discusses VDI and 5 VDI “anti-patterns.” From wikipedia:

an anti-pattern is a design pattern that may be commonly used but is ineffective and/or counterproductive in practice.

ViewYonder » Feeding the IT Shriekometer: 5 VDI anti-patterns.

The “anti-patterns,” or counterproductive practices, of VDI and the major benefits of VDI are two sides of the same “operational” coin.

Ideas are Commodities – Innovation is all about Execution

367 Addison Avenue

Phil McKinney, CTO for HP’s Personal Systems Group, is “passionate about creativity and innovation.”  He hosts the Killer Innovations podcast and has a Twitter feed of on-going killer questions to ask regarding innovation.

Here is an excellent 20 minute presentation that he gave at this Maker Faire.

Phil McKinney @ Maker Faire – Creating Killer Innovations .

Phil starts with “knowledge is a commodity” and then outlines a methodical approach to driving innovation.  I particularly liked his “FIRE” power: