Virtualization

Some people complain that the term "cloud computing" has become useless -- but even if we banished the words, IT would still face huge disruptions. So whether you call it banana computing or cloud computing, you'd better prepare for change, says CIO.com's Bernard Golden.

What have we learned from Google's latest outage? That 99.9 percent uptime doesn't matter during the other one-tenth of one percent.

Cloud computing will require IT to be masters of a private supply chain, argues CIO.com's Bernard Golden. Here's a look at the stack of services that must be in place for a cloud supply chain to operate.

Private cloud computing promises IT resources on the spot to business users. That means IT operations must emulate Wal-Mart's supply chain smarts -- coordinating sourcing, logistics, and rack stacking to ensure that IT can meet group demand. CIO.com's Bernard Golden sizes up the challenges of that transformation.

CIO.com's Bernard Golden says VMware's newest acquisition holds the potential to give VMware a premier position in marrying enterprises and cloud computing. Here's a look at the positives, as well as the negatives that could challenge a happily-ever-after outcome.

Virtualization's bottleneck was server memory; new servers address this. With cloud computing, the bottleneck is bandwidth to and from the cloud provider. CIO.com's Bernard Golden discusses four practical ways cloud customers can address this issue.

Small companies are always seeking ways to save a buck and, for many, making IT services more robust is often not a high priority. Virtualization is often seen as a feature of fancy, big-budget data centers, unfit for mom-and-pop businesses. But that's not an accurate perception. Here I'll demonstrate examples of how server virtualization can easily and inexpensively work in a smaller shop.

CIO.com's Bernard Golden says Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain got almost everything wrong in his recent New York Times diatribe on the perils of cloud computing. Here's Golden's rebuttal of Zittrain's points on lock-in, data security and innovation.

Every disruption also contains the seed of new products and services, which companies leverage for success. Last week, Microsoft and Google showed two new ways they're cashing in on the cloud. CIO.com's Bernard Golden explains what it means to you.

At GigaOM's Structure 09 Conference, CIO.com cloud guru Bernard Golden gained some perspective on bandwidth fears, commodity hardware questions, and real-life cloud challenges from companies already racing to keep up with computing demand.