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Alan Murphy

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Top Stories by Alan Murphy

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 cloud) virtual data center event. I’ve long said here that I think Microsoft is in the best position to make that move, but to be honest, Citrix currently has better technology. In other words, Microsoft has a better strategic play, Citrix a better tactical play. The announcements that came of out Synergy last week prove that. Citrix knows what it’s doing and they know how to build virtualization products to compete with VMware. As has been asked many times before, here and elsewhere:... (more)

Securing The Cloud

My heart is truly warmed (which isn’t easy) by all the talk around cloud security. This may mark the first time in my career that I’ve seen a non-security bleeding-edge technology (c’mon, the cloud is bleeding like a sieve) hit the market coupled with concerns and ideas about security. Even if we look to the virtual foundation of the cloud, none of those technologies (hypervisors, virtual CPUs, shared RAM, storage virtualization, etc) hit the market with any care or concern about security. In this way the cloud is creating a new model of accessible computing in more ways than one... (more)

Dynamic Infrastructure: Are We Over the Hump?

I am the king of starting blog posts with “I know, it’s been a while…” So I’ll dispense with that intro here and get right to the goods. I’ve been traveling a fair amount lately, speaking on the impact virtualization has on your applications, and talking to customers about their current virtualization issues. As you know I typically talk about the virtual platforms: hypervisors, resource management, virtual networking, and how all of that trickles up the stack to your applications. In other words: What happens to my web app when I move my web farm from physical servers to virt... (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 your entire app is deployed in the cloud and users are going directly there for data; the user won’t notice any difference between accessing your app after it’s moved to AWS than they did when y... (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 one I think Microsoft got 100% correct. Now if only they’d franchise Azure we’d really be cookin’ ;). But what about enterprise customers using Azure? Since enterprise virtualization is the overwh... (more)