Alan Murphy

After pushing my latest post, Securing the Cloud: Shared Hardware and the Data Plane, Hoff posted a series of excellent questions and responses to the post via Twitter. I thought responding via another blog post, so that his questions could be addressed alongside my last post, was the way to go. I’ve trimmed some of his questions here for brevity but all of his questions can be found on his Twitter stream. And here we go. @thevirtualdc I hate to tell you this, but your last blog isn’t about securing “the Cloud” at all. You are interchanging cloud & virt… You are correct that I am presumptively interchanging the cloud with virtualization within the cloud. The primary point of this series of cloud security posts is to break out all the areas that securing the cloud entails,... (more)

Choosing Between Azure and VMM Private Clouds

I’ve spent the past day reviewing all that’s floating around the Interwebs on the Azure announcements from the WPC this week. There are definitely a lot of nice nuggets to digest and stuff that’s going to take a while to process. Most of the Azure talk at WPC has been, as expected, about how partners can benefit from and build solutions on top of Azure. That’s a compelling message and on... (more)

Why Microsoft Should Finally Buy Citrix

DISCLAIMER: This is long and the opinions are mine. I’ve written a good bit here about the various ways Microsoft and Citrix overlap in the hypervisor space, ranging from topics like shared code base through competition for the desktop space. To me, these two players have always been the underdogs battling for the right to go head-to-head against VMware in the main enterprise (and now cl... (more)

Security Implications of Virtualization Platforms in the Virtual Data Center

According to Forrester Research, 42% of all enterprise server resources will be virtualized by 2009. [1] Referred to by many names - server virtualization, OS virtualization, kernel virtualization - virtual machine (VM) platforms, such as VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V, are typically the first forms of virtualization introduced to the data center. These technologies are becoming both l... (more)

Regional Cloud Computing Providers

One of the oft discussed business challenges of cloud-based application deployments – or any remote app deployment where a service has to communicate over the public internet – is latency. It takes more time to fetch data when a request has to leave the LAN, and latency is usually variable and at the mercy of both the Interwebs and the cloud provider. This isn’t so much of an issue when ... (more)