Sean Donaldson, Director of IT Infrastructure at Secure-24, gives testimonial of the Cisco Nexus 1000v. by Official1000V

Vblock by kacole2

UK based service provider, Cobweb Solutions, implemented Vblock Infrastructure Platforms to build flexible hosting platforms for applications as a service. by VCEcomputing

BlueWater is a solution provider serving the New York/New Jersey metro area. BlueWater helps customers acheive their IT goals in less time, and with greater efficiency leveraging the Vblock platform from VCE. by VCEcomputing

If you read Techmeme then perhaps you saw the posts today concerning the challenges of social event sharing and the meta commentary upon the article from Plancast CEO Mark Hendrickson.

Here’s the thing…

I love Plancast.

I have used Plancast hundreds if not thousands of times. Even for my own personal Plancast I use it a lot (over 200 Plancast events so far) because I travel a lot. In fact, I presently have 14 events on my Plancast for 2012. http://plancast.com/qthrul

To put it simply, Plancast is a serendipity service. Serendipity is my top use case.

For example…

When I go out to the West coast there is always something plancasted (verb?) that I can isolate and refine as evening events to consider. So many people put up event content there that I am bound to find something to occupy my evenings.

SxSW is an annual pilgrimage for me. This year I am doing another pre-SxSW 2012 meal in Austin and posted this: http://plancast.com/p/7p87/lunch-50-pre-sxsw-meetup where I invited a few people I knew might be interested. Now there are more than a dozen that are showing up organically. How cool is that?

You see… I’ve tried upcoming, meetup, eventbrite, facebook, random startups doing similar things, etc… Unfortunately, each one tends to be a silo that makes event discovery a bit of a chore or simply a closed environment to itself.

Plancast makes it easy for me to just select a city and see what has been created or imported from these other services. I allow Plancast to consume all these other services so that I can have one easy to share stream of planned events and activities. And yet…

Wisdom of the (M)asses

I scrolled down to the comments (never scroll down to the comments) on the primary TechCrunch article and noted a listing of critiques. In no specific order or weighting:

Lacking:

• Personal brand account or Event Series account to share events
• Integration with Facebook
• Calendar separation and sharing
• Mobile support
• Business model
• No Maybe or Share options
• Vertical integration to shorten event registrations

General:

• Didn’t listen to users (no idea what this means)
• Difficult to search for and add events
• Competes with Facebook
• Should suggest who to follow (SUL)
• You should be more like [insert spamvertized other startup URL]

Here’s the thing… even if you were to digest all of this with an insightful eye there would still be the elephant in the room: Facebook. If you pull back and look at the summaries, most of the comments digest down to saying a consumer web startup service should be more like Facebook. Yet, if that was the case — if we all had Facebook — would there be any consumer web startups? Fascinating.

So, I’ll repeat again: Never scroll down to the comments.

Hello 2012. Let’s rip the cover off this one!

Today begins my two week experiment of life without public social media.

Say what!??

No Twitter. No Foursquare. No Google Plus. No Instagram. No Path. No Linkedin. No Tumblr. No Flipboard. No Flickr. No YouTube. No TinyReview. No LiveJournal. No Diaspora. No… you get the picture.

(I’m not leaving Facebook out… I just don’t use it.)

Okay. Now what?

Instead of using public social media resources, I’ll be focused on 100% behind the corporate firewall(s), CIDR restricted, Shib/PL/RSA/etc. protected and otherwise Enterprise only class forms of private and hybrid social media.

What I’ve noticed now that I get to interact daily with a decidedly non-public facing non-publically consumable stream of raw sensitive information is this:

Tightly aligned, low friction, reasonably secured sharing is key.

Requiring a dozen or more places to consume/share/interact is tantamount to making busy people just move on without you.

What does private and hybrid social media look like?

• Cisco
  • Cisco Quad
  • Cisco WebEx
  • Cisco Jabber
• VMware
  • VMware Socialcast
  • VMware SlideRocket
• EMC
  • EMC Blogs
  • EMC Documentum

(and some other VCE specific fun stuff that I cannot link to for what are hopefully obvious reasons…)

Tune in again after January 14th, 2012 and I’ll share my findings.

ACS, a Xerox company, provides IT and business process outsourcing services to customers around the globe using Vblock™ Infrastructure Platforms. Customer demand for rapid provisioning of IT services and on-demand access to those services led ACS to invest in an automated cloud-based architecture. Vblock Infrastructure Platforms, offering stateless computing, 10-GB unified fabric, and a flexible open-standard architecture, have enabled ACS to increase its flexibility while minimizing process deployment times from between 60 and 90 minutes to under 20 minutes. This flexibility, combined with the proven reliability and support of VCE parent companies, Cisco, EMC, and VMware, enables ACS to offer its customers world-class service.

Video property of VCE. by VCEcomputing

Harris Corporation, an international communications and information technology company, discusses the cyberintegration market, application stacks, virtual computing, and the cloud environment. The company shares the success of its Vblock solution from VCE in enhancing and expanding Harris Trusted Enterprise Cloud Solution, and relieving reluctances of trust and control in the cloud environment. With the Vblock system, Harris Corporation is able to offer its customers the benefits of reducing operating costs and universal access to information with the full support of leading-edge technology providers.

Video property of VCE. by VCEcomputing

SAIC is a scientific, engineering, and technology applications company serving customers in national security, energy and the environment, critical infrastructure, and health. Faced with the challenge of providing a large, scalable solution with great reliability, the company turned to Vblock™ Infrastructure Platforms. The Vblock solution provided SAIC with a long-term, cost-effective solution to serve multiple applications to its customers, including utility-based portals and load control management systems. The Vblock solution’s ability to scale and adapt on the fly grants SAIC the agility necessary to maintain leading stance in the marketplace.

Video property of VCE. by VCEcomputing

PAETEC is a communications service provider, serving mid- to enterprise-level customers. In expanding its data center services, PAETEC turned to VCE to create a strategic vision for expanding services in the cloud space. The combination of the VCE partnership and Vblock™ Infrastructure Platforms has enabled PAETEC to build up several commercial platforms from launch to continued updates. Through this collaborative effort, PAETEC is able to offer technical services around cloud computing and a suite of network connectivity services, altogether a winning offer for their customers.

Video property of VCE. by VCEcomputing

Waller Lansden Dortch & Davis, LLP reaps the benefits of VCE’s Vblock Infrastrucutre Platform to increase efficiency and manage IT challenges. by VCEcomputing

Greg Bowden, Group Vice President Data Centre Solutions takes us through what Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) is, and how Cisco, EMC and VMware have developed a set of VCE professional services to enable private cloud. How these services can help organisations transform their current IT infrastructures to accelerate strategic business impact, using the Vblock architecture, how VCE professional services will help define an organisation’s cloud vision, a cloud strategy that aligns with business needs, an architecture and high-level design, with a plan to deploy the Vblock solution, as well as what Dimension Data’s value proposition with VCE looks like. by DimensionData

This demonstration highlights VCE’s Vblock FastPath Platform and how it can help your organization implement a highly scalable, integrated and validated path to desktop virtualization. by VCEcomputing

to learn more about #modernIT, visit http://www.nimsoft.com Aaron tells us about why Vblock is a big deal. Saves power, time, and money. by Nimsoft1

I’m on vacation today. Yes, it’s awesome. I even got to play Beer Santa!

After dropping off some holiday cheer, I scrolled through my Twitter stream and I came across a tweet from Kevin Kelling aka @BlueShiftBlog regarding a cloud article. Interestingly, the article was from… Wired. Yes. Wired. Yes. That Wired.

Over the River and Through the Woods to Cloud Computing We Go

In the Wired article by @jonst0kes (with a 0) there are references to Moore’s Law, workloads, bursty things, and that demmed elusive Pimpernel… the public cloud. You should check it out too.

We’re going to be seeing cloud taken apart in a lot more consumer web blogs and non-traditional IT coverage blogs now. What is yet to be determined in all things cloud is the level of dismantling and elemental economic review associated with the latest consumer device being dissected with a running tally of part costs via kit alone.

SPOILER: It’s not always about just the kit.

Having read through this article a few times (it has paragraphs and stuff) I have determined I need to write a blog post. Yes. Friday Fudge style.

The Dude

Something has been bothering me about cloud computing for two years now

Me too man. It’s like a new shirt that you forgot to wash and it is really scratchy. Annoying, am I right? It’s also like when people try to compare the credit card pay as you go bring your own chaos monkey (BYOCM) service to one where you enter into a workload tuned SLA backed contract with performance penalty clauses.

The Villain

Cloud services don’t drop drastically in price the way that transistors do

If only we can keep people thinking the cloud is synonymous with INCREASINGLY FREE BEER! Then our trap will have been successful! Yes, please assume that everyone and everything fits into the generic public cloud! Let’s be sure to make it seem that statements made on a stage regarding software applications younger than 1 year old adequately represent what 99.9% of all companies on the planet do today across all their lines of business ARE COMPLETELY LOGICAL AND WITHOUT FLAW. It is perfectly reasonable to just speak in absolutes and subscribe to hyperbole!

The Biker

The problem arises when the overlap between what the public cloud supplies and what a customer needs is fairly narrow.

Look man… this cloud stuff is going to be about a lot of things over the next 3-4 years but what it won’t be about is a specific reference to any single infrastructure company or player. We’re in the early days. Just like this consumer web thing that spawned 10429 ways to share photos and post it to Twitter, Facebook, and a zillion other places — saying we don’t need another photo sharing app doesn’t mean we need don’t need another cloud company. We just need to know which ride is our ride right now and which ride is our ride tomorrow… and how much it would cost to add some bichin’spider lights.

The Barber

The downside to the “outsourced heavy lifting” aspect of cloud comes when you don’t have a whole lot of heavy lifting to do, at which point you’re subsidizing someone else’s heavy lifting.

The weather is a funny thing you know? Just looking back a year ago it seemed like nobody was going to contain what cloud was and wasn’t. Now, it seems we are all bent on sticking cloud into a box. Hah! No pun intended! I tell ya… one thing is for sure — there is going to be clouds. Big. Small. Tall. Short. Fat. Skinny. Decaf. All of it is good. All of it is disruptive. It’s not so much about the horse race but where the primary race venues are to be found: locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally… and the entry fees.

The Bland

companies are much more excited by private and hybrid cloud models than they are about the public cloud

Pundits will continue to isolate and refine specific definitions and attempt to draw on historical trends as a basis for extrapolation — often in a contrived zero sum game. This is not new. What is new is the creative destruction of what has previously been an accepted method of satisfying workload requirements — dedicated one off silos of physical infrastructure. So while the notion of a service provider might sound quaint or Orwellian depending on your point of view, the end goal of the enterprise team both large and small is to do more with less and increase satisfaction to the end user. That means moving towards internal service provider models and making things happen in ways end users often think of as being available only externally. In fact, it can be both and we’re on a road that takes us there.

http://bit.ly/AtHNM and www.vce.com/vblock –Watch Aaron Delp, VCE, Sr. Manager, Solutions Architect, Service Provider and Vertical Solutions, present what is new for VMware vSphere 5 integration on Vblock Infrastructure Platforms. by VMwarePartnerTV

Kunjal Trivedi, director of Solutions Marketing for VCE, discusses the new Vblock™ FastPath Desktop Virtualization Platform, a fully integrated turnkey solution for virtualizing a desktop environment. Built on Vblock Infrastructure Platforms, the Vblock FastPath platform is purpose-built to help simplify desktop management and automate deployment and provisioning of desktops. With the Vblock FastPath platform, customers with little or no virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) experience can deploy a more secure, cost-effective, and flexible desktop environment, while reducing time to deployment from three to six months, to less than 30 days.

This video is property of VCE. by VCEcomputing

Samsung was nice enough to let me borrow their Cisco 4500 POE switch which has some advanced POE technology in it. I’m told that the switch can power devices up to 60W. When I first saw this I was pretty amazed and I decided that I wanted to come up with a fun way to “reveal” it, yet if you’ve clicked on the video you already know the title and thus its a bit of a spoiler. Oh well, I just thought it’d be fun to put a integrated monitor in the middle of a river. I’m that kind of nerd. Hope you like it.

Samsung, because sometimes their isn’t power when you need it. by gunnarwb

holidaze © by qthrul

After sending out individual tweets for each and every job posting it occurred to me that a summary might make more sense when there are more than a couple of job postings. Today I was asking around and sure enough the latest bunch is live on Linkedin.

What you’ll notice in the list below are only from Linkedin. There are more on vce.com/careers but I’ve not yet figured out how to deep link to those (annoying!). Thankfully, the new HOT JOBS section is giving me hope ;-).

So here are the highlights for the Americas and EMEA teams:

Senior Performance Engineer – VCE Application Solutions Engineering
VCE – “Santa Clara, CA” – Dec 6, 2011

Senior Software Engineering Manager
VCE – San Francisco Bay Area – Dec 6, 2011

Principal Product Manager
VCE – San Francisco Bay Area – Dec 6, 2011

Senior Software Engineer (Web UI and Front-end Engineer)
VCE – Santa Clara, CA – Dec 6, 2011

Principal Solutions Engineer
VCE – “Santa Clara, CA” – Dec 6, 2011

Vblock Systems Architect
VCE – “San Jose, CA” – Dec 6, 2011

Business Operations Analyst
VCE – “Marlborough, MA” “Richardson, TX” – Dec 6, 2011

Senior EMC Storage Implementation Specialist
VCE – “Frankfurt or Munich Germany” – Dec 5, 2011

Senior Support Engineer – LEVEL 3 (Virtualization or Networking)
VCE – “Cork Ireland” – Dec 5, 2011

If any of these spots look interesting to you just drop me a note, leave a comment here, or ping me on Twitter.

QTHRUL.MUXTAPE.COM © by qthrul

I have heard folks from time to time talk about Evernote or reference It in passing in their social streams. Yet, I don’t recall using it or even kicking the tires. The horror.

What prompted this experiment? Oddly enough, it was ifttt.com and the listing of supported channels. One of the channels as you might have guessed is Evernote.

I also noticed my email style has looked more like Markdown since starting with VCE. That might be due to the need to reference things or the volume of information a particular email can contain.

So much for #noemail ;-)

On another front I am trying to pull together more content for fudge.org and bristled at using something that was WordPress specific — it all tends to suffer from myopic application goals IMHO. So, Evernote seems like it a might be what I am looking for. It is notes — everywhere!

My dream scenario is create Markdown as notes in Evernote in a blog notebook and then use a plugin or series of plugins to pull RSS into fudge.org and render the markdown. I might have that wrong in ordering but that is my plan for now until I reach a failure.

Right now my ifttt.com recipes are more around social sharing tools that are image oriented. I have been concerned that all these twitter tweeted pics on services like twitpic are lost to the sands of random downtime or worse… Unavailable for capture at all.