There’s been lots of buzz on the virtualization front over the past month …  In August, Microsoft announced the RTM version of Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2, the latest major releases of the Windows Server and System Center families.  In addition, at VMworld this year, VMware announced the latest edition of their vSphere hypervisor platform: VMware vSphere 5.5. IT Pros have been very interested in learning about the pros and cons presented by each offering – particularly because the total cost of Windows Server 2012 R2 + System Center 2012 R2 can be quite attractive in comparison to VMware’s offerings. More information: See Shopping for Private Clouds for a sample cost comparison between Microsoft and VMware virtualization solutions based on real-world requirements. With so many features called by differing names in each virtualization platform... (more)

Cloud Expo 2011 East To Attract 10,000 Delegates and 200 Exhibitors

SYS-CON Events announced today that the 8th International Cloud Expo will take place June 6-9, 2011, in New York City. The International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series is the world's leading Cloud-focused event and is held three times a year, in New York, Silicon Valley and in Europe. Over 600 corporate sponsors and 10,000 industry professionals have participated in Cloud Computing Expo since its inception, more than all other Cloud-related events put together. Cloud Computing Expo 2011 East Call for Papers Deadline November 30, 2010 - SUBMIT YOUR SPEAKING PROPOSAL TODAY! The four-day event will offer a rich array of sessions led by exceptional speakers about the business and technical value of cloud computing with more than 150 sponsors and exhibitors and over 5,000 estimated delegates from well over 48 different countries. Explore Cloud Expo Sponsorship &... (more)

Where Are RIA Technologies Headed in 2008?

I am always being told off by i-technologists for quoting Picasso as having said that computers are useless. But I still love his reasoning? "Because they can only give you answers." Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of the world's leading rich Internet application pioneers are thinking may be the next questions that we need to see answered. From that readers can themselves infer where AJAX is headed. What are the top questions to ask next about AJAX? Eric Miraglia of Yahoo! 1.  (From March'08) How do I calculate the ROI of building my RIA on the iPhone SDK vs using AJAX? 2.  How do I assess the performance of my app and decide what to do next to make it faster?  3.  When it comes to accessibility, how do I know what's required of me for my rich web apps?  Beyond what's required, what makes good business se... (more)

Cloud Expo, Inc. Announces Cloud Expo 2011 New York Venue

Click Here to Save $800 at Cloud Expo New York ! Cloud Expo, Inc. announced on Thursday that Cloud Expo 2011 New York, the 8th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, will take place June 6-9, 2011, at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Expo - International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series is the world’s leading Cloud-focused event and is held in New York, Silicon Valley, Prague, Tokyo, and Hong-Kong. Over 900 corporate sponsors and more than 65,000 industry professionals have participated in Cloud Expo since its inception, tenfold more than all other Cloud-related events put together. Click Here to Save $800 at Cloud Expo New York ! "Cloud Expo was announced on February 24, 2007, the day the term ‘cloud computing' was coined," said Fuat Kircaali, Chairman and Founder of Cloud Expo, Inc. "Cloud has become synonymous with ‘computing' and ‘soft... (more)

Why .NET Deployment Automation Is Vital for Agility

Why .NET Deployment Automation Is Vital for Agility By Ron Gidron Developing and deploying large-scale .NET-based applications can quickly become a time-consuming and error-prone process, as you waste resources and expose yourself to the risk of failure and diminished employee satisfaction. It may seem a trivial task at first, but as .NET development is scaled to hundreds of applications and thousands of servers, its deployment must be automated like any other process if you are to achieve enterprise-wide agility. It's time to take action. Use Cases As your .NET code base and your number of applications grow, .NET deployment automation becomes a bigger challenge and many aspects need to be considered. Here are two examples of what may be required for a .NET deployment automation scenario: Scenario 1 Windows Services Workflow deploys application, creates Windows ser... (more)

How to Run @AppDynamics in @Azure | @CloudExpo

“Is it possible to run the AppDynamics controller within my own Microsoft Azure IaaS?” I hear this question fairly regularly and would like to walk you through how to host the controller in your own Azure cloud. First off, the pros of having AppDynamics with Azure: Have full control and ownership of the data collected by AppDynamics Provide additional security to access the data (for example, lock it down to a corporate VPN only). Enable easy integration between AppDynamics and your services, such as Active Directory for authentication or internal bug tracking system for alert notifications. These would typically require opening custom ports when you leverage the AppDynamics SaaS environment. AppDynamics works by placing an agent running on your servers which reports to the controller. It’s common to have several agents monitoring your applications. To further the ea... (more)

Who Makes A 'Better' DevOps Vendor? | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]

My Wish List From Microsoft Azure DevOps Solutions in 2015 As the DevOps movement is growing every day, naturally we find quite of lot of vendors offering DevOps solutions. The main reason for multiple different offerings from multiple vendors is the lack of clear definition and understanding among the consumers of  DevOps. Most of the offerings back track from benefits of DevOps, as DevOps is all about fast turn around of new business capability features from a software product towards its end customers. This means that wide array of products that aim at, faster  provisioning (Cloud), error free infrastructure configuration (automation) and faster build/test/deploy (continuous integration) products can fit into the realm of DevOps. This is one of the reasons lots of  'traditional' Infrastructure and Application Performance Management (APM) vendors have joined the Dev... (more)

I Have Three Free Guest Passes for the iPhone Developer Summit

As a speaker at the upcoming AJAX World RIA Conference & Expo, June 22-23, in New York City, I just received an email from Lindsay over at SYS-CON Events, that I can invite three guests with full conference passes to attend the two-day iPhone Developer Summit. She just informed me about the coupon code "iPhonespeakerguestexpo"  (case sensitive) that I can use to invite three guests with. I am not planning to bring anyone with me from Sydney, Australia, so here it is for you to take advantage of. The registration page can be found here. If you have any registration problems, you can contact Susan at 201 802 3020 or by email events (at) sys-con.com. See you in New York City on Monday! --Yeshim ... (more)

Rich Content with a Database Server

Enterprises are increasingly being called upon to provide a high level of user experience with compelling and interactive content. Serving enterprise content and data securely to internet / intranet has become a very common necessity and is routinely handled by web servers. Web services technology, on the other hand, addresses the application-to-application transparent interaction over the web using industry standards. Delivery of web services can also be handled by databases which are responsive to HTTP requests. In this article a simple example of serving a static web page containing dynamic content from a SQL Anywhere 11 database server is described. The web page has examples of jQuery, DOJO, as well as an embedded ADOBE flash file. Web servers and database web servers Web servers enable enterprises to expose their data and information to intranet and internet use... (more)

Governmental Cloud Interoperability on The Microsoft Cloud

Interesting post over at the interoperability @ Microsoft blog on viewing public government data with Windows Azure and PHP. The post outlines a functional example of a governmental cloud interoperability scenario using REST. The demo is part of Microsoft's Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) a cloud-based collection of software assets that enables publicly available government data to be easily accessible. Using open standards and application programming interfaces (API), developers and government agencies can retrieve the data programmatically for use in new and innovative online applications, or mashups. The scenario uses publicly available government data sets that have been loaded into Windows Azure Storage, and the OGDI team built a data service that exposes the data through REST web services, returning data by default in the Atom Publishing Protocol form... (more)

So Is Microsoft Gonna Buy Adobe?

Adobe had an interesting afternoon Thursday. That’s when the New York Times came out and blogged that it knew from employees and consultants who were involved or simply knew that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Shantanu Narayen, the CEO of Flash-wielding, Apple-banned Adobe, met recently at Adobe’s offices in San Francisco for “secret” talks, and that they talked mostly about Apple’s control over smartphones and how Microsoft and Adobe could join forces in an anti-Apple front and that one of the ways of doing that would be for Microsoft to buy Adobe. Well, a 3Par-sensitized stock market went nuts, and bid Adobe stock up 17% until trading was halted by volatility-minded circuit breakers. Adobe closed up 11.5% at $28.69 for a market cap of $14.8 billion. Adobe PR didn’t deny the meeting; it just wouldn’t discuss it. One source told the Times that Microsoft had courted A... (more)