After years spent focusing on personal technology, businesses are increasingly turning back to the enterprise. The corporate IT market is much more dynamic and competitive, with a few very large “superpower” companies discovering their power to drive purchasing decisions. If a supplier can create an integrated “stack” of hardware and software, they can push product purchases that might otherwise be overlooked or postponed. This is the main reason that enterprise IT acquisitions work so well: Where a small company must fight to sell their product, a large one can hitch it to a much more strategic sale and have it pulled along.
Computer History
Considering the history of computing, from the enterprise to the home.
Dell + EqualLogic, Exanet, Ocarina, 3Par = What?
The storage industry got a lot more competitive this morning, as Dell announced plans to buy 3Par. This is the latest round in a well-established race for the enterprise storage dollar, challenging superpower (and Dell partner) EMC in the high-end SAN space. What does this acquisition say about the industry as a whole? Where are we headed?
A VMware Hypervisor For Networkers?
As my friend Stu Miniman pointed out, a recent VMware video suggests the company is about to jump into networking in a big way. This new offering would be a generic hypervisor for virtual network devices, from load balancers to security appliances, and would presumably be integrated with the existing vNetwork Distributed Switch functionality. This appears to be more than just a generic version of what Cisco already uses for their Nexus 1000V!
How Apple Will Get Their Mobile Phone Mojo Back From AT&T
Apple has taken a beating from the “in crowd” lately. In the mind of these technophiles, they’ve gone from hip to evil in just a few years. While Apple is lambasted for turning the iPhone “walled garden” into a jail, Google is applauded as the new bastion of openness and geek friendliness. This criticism focuses on the iPhone, especially with regard to the despised American mobile carrier, AT&T. But Apple is a long way from the evil empire it’s accused of being, and is showing signs that it will soon retake its mojo from the carriers.
A High-Performance, Low-Memory Apache/PHP Virtual Private Server
I’ve previously written about my Multi-Server Web Hosting Environment and the how I Tuned Lighttpd For Linux to run as well as possible. But I’ve been having weird issues with that setup lately and was forced to rebuild the server entirely. While I was at it, I decided to give Apache another try, since the lighttpd hackery I needed to perform to get things like WP-SuperCache running were starting to get me down. The configuration documented here uses Ubuntu Lucid (10.04), Apache 2.2, FCGI, and PHP-CGI tuned for a 512 MB virtual private server (VPS) running on Rackspace Slicehost.
