Alan Murphy

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 usuall... (more)

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, wa... (more)

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 expecte... (more)

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 alway... (more)

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... (more)

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... (more)

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... (more)

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; ... (more)

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 fi... (more)

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 sec... (more)

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 typ... (more)