Latest News from Alan Murphy

Regional Cloud Computing Providers

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:00:00 EDT

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 [...]

Security Cloud Assumptions

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 11:00:00 EDT

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 [...]

Choosing Between Azure and VMM Private Clouds

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:45:00 EDT

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 [...]

Why Microsoft Should Finally Buy Citrix

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:30:00 EDT

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.

Dynamic Infrastructure: Are We Over the Hump?

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:57:24 EDT

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 [...]

RSA 2009: Quiet Static, Loud Whispers

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 11:57:47 EDT

My favorite quote from RSA: “TheVirtualDC? Your blog is about virtualization and data centers, not security. Why do you even want to come to RSA?”* Ahhh, finally back at the home office after two weeks of conferences: VMware Partner Expo in Orlando and RSA in San Francisco (with a pinch of SAP Virtualization Week thrown in [...]

Virtual Networking: Overlapping IPs Inside the Cloud

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 11:09:21 EDT

I’ve been heads-down for the past few weeks in product land so I haven’t had much time to poke my head up into the clouds. I’m now standing up straight again, stretching, and getting back to thinking about the larger macro issues that cloud presents. Today I’m going to talk about one very specific issue: [...]

Securing the Cloud: Shared Hardware and the Data Plane

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 15:32:34 EST

Frequent readers will understand my love of lists, my affinity for the 4D attack plan methodology (Define, Design, Develop, Deploy), and my need to break things into small addressable (bite-sized) chunks. Over the past week I’ve been laying the groundwork for securing the cloud; not the technical “Use this VM, configure these VLANs, tether the [...]

Securing the Cloud: Small Bites, Cloud Tapas

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:44:59 EST

I like lists. There’s no getting around my need to itemize everything, and surprisingly this is something that comes up in my every day life, every day. I even had a debate with someone recently on the proper way to structure pro and con lists: I prefer horizontal (pros listed first, then cons), she prefers [...]

Securing The Cloud

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 16:56:00 EST

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 [...]

Security Implications of Virtualization Platforms in the Virtual Data Center

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 05:50:00 EST

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 less expensive and more accessible, making them attractive candidates to be the first virtual "guinea pigs" in the data center.