Recently, Canada's CTO Jirka Danek gave a speech where he highlighted the opportunities in cloud and green IT for Canada. Bill St. Arnaud's blog carried the details. The arguments for Canada include: Well positioned to become a world leader in…
Author: Tim M. Crawford
Tim Crawford is ranked as one of the top most influential CIOs. Tim is a transformational CIO with broad experience that takes a provocative, but pragmatic approach to the intersection of business and technology.
Tim has served as CIO and other senior IT leadership roles with global organizations such as Konica Minolta/ All Covered, Stanford University, Knight-Ridder, Philips Electronics and National Semiconductor. Tim is also host of the CIO In The Know podcast.
Microsoft Sidekick Data Loss Not a Blow to Cloud
Stemming from the Microsoft Sidekick Data Loss event, some are highlighting the dangers of cloud computing. Of course there is also the contrarian view too. But the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Is cloud computing dangerous? As with many things,…
Data Center World: Cloud and Data Center Comments
AFCOM's Data Center World conference was held Oct 4-7, 2009 in Orlando, FL. Dr. Zen Kishimoto from AltaTerra Research Network posted a nice set of updates to his blog: Zen and the Art of Data Center Greening. There is quite…
Rackspace Data Center Outage: Cause for Concern or Time for a Change in Strategy?
Rackspace, a popular hosting provider in the cloud, suffered a significant outage on June 29, 2009. Apparently, a power interruption caused their Dallas (DFW-Grapevine) data center to go offline. Rackspace has posted a copy of the incident report here: http://www.rackspace.com/downloads/pdfs/DFWIncidentReport6-29-2009.pdf…
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Cap and Trade Impact on Data Centers
Cap and trade is a relatively new threat to data centers. However, the concept is not new; having been around for decades. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a website dedicated to their programs. http://www.epa.gov/captrade/ The cap and…
Strategic Impact of Acquisitions: Oracle Acquisition of Virtual Iron Example
This week’s announcement of Oracle’s (NYSE: ORCL) acquisition of Virtual Iron caused a bit of a stir. Oracle’s press release is a bit vague and financial terms were not disclosed: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/018535 The acquisition acknowledges an architectural shift toward a collapsed…
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Importance of Private Clouds
First a quick primer on private vs. public clouds… Private clouds are, in many aspects, similar to their public big brothers. However, a private cloud is essentially a pooling of resources within an organization. The limit to the economies of…
Should Google Outage Cause Change in Cloud Computing Strategy?
Google suffered an outage this week that left 14% of their users headed to sites in China rather than the US. As such, a traffic jam between the US & Asia ensued. Google’s SVP of Operations posted an update to…
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Cloud Computing Goes Mainstream
For years, the magazines on aircraft have played a significant role in the direction of technology. Many an executive have returned from a flight brim with interest in an article they read in the airline’s complementary magazine. For years, the…
Google Data Center Efficiency Summit
I had the opportunity to attend Google's Data Center Efficiency Summit. During the summit, Google took some of the mystery of their data center operations. In addition to a number of presenters, Google displayed one of their custom server models. It…