Latest News from Billy Marshall

Cloud Computing Casts Shadow on Walled Gardens

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 18:30:00 EDT

As a technology provider that helps application companies embrace cloud computing by virtualizing the applications to run on any cloud, I was a bit disappointed with Google's AppEngine announcement. It appears that Google is embracing the 'walled garden' approach of SalesForce.com and Microsoft instead of the cloud approach of Amazon.

Will Managing VM Sprawl Lead to Rogue Cloud Deployments?

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 14:45:00 EST

I just read an interesting article regarding the potential cost pitfalls associated with VM sprawl. Jett Thompson, an enterprise computing architect from Boeing, has developed a cost model regarding the benefits of virtualization and the related pitfalls of VM sprawl. It seems that virtualization is easy to justify, so long as you don't give the users everything that they want.

The Virtual Machine Tsunami

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:45:00 EST

Over the past two weeks, I have had a number of very interesting conversations with partners, prospects, customers, and analysts that lead me to believe that a virtual machine tsunami is building which might soon swamp the legacy, horizontal system management approaches. Here is what I have heard: Two separate prospects told me that they have quickly consumed every available bit of capacity on their VMware server farms. As soon as they add more capacity, it disappears under the weight of an ever pressing demand of new VMs.

rPath Founder & CSO Speaking Next Week at SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo November 19-21 in Silicon Valley

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 07:30:00 EST

The problem with the notion of “Windows for EC2” is that it perpetuates the broken, legacy model of tying your application to the infrastructure upon which it runs. In the legacy model, applications became artificially tied to the physical server upon which they ran, and server utilization was low because it is very difficult to run multiple applications on a single instance of a general purpose operating system.

The High Cost of Independence

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 13:00:00 EDT

The acronym ISV stands for Independent Software Vendor. Historically, independence was important to protect customers from the proprietary lock-in associated with third-party components such as hardware or system software. A greater choice of interoperable components gave customers greater flexibility to procure and assemble a system that met their needs. Microsoft alleviated some of this concern with the Windows platform because customers could always choose multiple hardware providers when selecting applications that ran on Windows. Of course, an application that only runs on Windows isn't exactly an 'independent' application, but customers seem to accept hardware independence as sufficient freedom. (More on Microsoft and Windows later.)