GCG senior staff have completed the most harrowing leg of their VMware road trip: a 149-mile stretch of switchbacks, scooter-sized roadway, and bovine obstacles between Bodega Bay and Leggett, CA on State Highway 1. In defense of our route choice, it didn’t look so bad on the Verizon Navigator

A recent Business Week article discussed the potential for a techie president. Many in the industry are sure to agree with the following sentiment expressed by Adam Kovacevich, a spokesman for Google: “We want to make sure the next President is a ‘tech President.'” We at GCG heartily concur decisions affecting high tech such as science and engineering education incentives, the expansion of Internet access to rural and inner-city areas, and worker visas are made at the highest levels. A healthy tech industry contributes to the economic health of the United States….

Lucian Lipinsky and Ron Pondiscio of Deloitte Consulting seemed a little out of place here in San Francisco dark suits, East-coast accents, and not drunk on the VMware Kool-Aid. These gentlemen like VMware and presented common-sense rationale for its implementation, but almost alone in a sea (well, in this case, a bay) of virtualization fervor, they sounded a note of reason.

First of all, this isn’t new. Anyone heard of mainframes? In the 60s? Or server consolidation on Unix in the 90s and 00s? Get real.

I used to find it irritating, back in the day, to watch a genuinely amusing TV comedy and become distracted from the jokes by the unnecessary laugh track.

One session I attended at last week’s VMworld evoked that same sort of irritation. I appreciated the basic overview provided during

Getting the Green Light for Your Virtual Infrastructure

, but the relentless cheerleading and gratuitous slams on other vendors, plus their myopia concerning other virtualization solutions was a little off-putting.

Hewlett-Packard held its 3Q FY2007 Server Quarterly Business Update for IT Analysts on 9/6 to provide the “story behind the numbers” and answer analysts’ irritating questions.  We were assured that HP is the most efficient supplier of storage and servers…

I wish I weren’t just coming off a full day of airline hell…then I might have an easier time finding the words to savage the thinking behind Sun Microsystems move from their SUNW ticker to the JAVA symbol. Lots of folks have already weighed in, with reactions ranging from bemusement (most outsiders) to anger (as I’ve heard from Sun insiders). The justification from Jonathan is that this is all about brand equity and that OpenOffice and Java are two of the best known brands on the internet. He goes on to say…

Had a briefing from a company who has an interesting approach to making virtualization more efficient and less resource hungry. FastScale is a new (founded 1/06) Sunnyvale company that has developed a virtualization provisioning package that cuts down the size of virtualized guest operating systems and applications by as much as 99%. In a RHEL4/Apache example, the standard load of application, libraries, drivers, etc., totals 3GB. With FastScale, the same software, with the same functionality only needs to load 30MB of data. Their secret sauce is their software that analyzes the application software from a needs standpoint, and then only loads as much of the operating system (and application) as is absolutely needed for the environment. Unnecessary drivers don’t load; libraries that aren’t needed don’t go on the system, even parts of the application that aren’t applicable to the particular installation are jettisoned.

Some of you visitors may have made your way here through a link on The Register. I was a recent guest on an Ashlee Vance Semi-Coherent Computing Meatcast where we discussed the x86 server market, x86 virtualization, and a few…

Science (a really important scientific journal, maybe the only one you need – which is why they can get away with calling themselves “Science”) is set to publish papers by IBM researchers this week on the possibility of atomic-level computing….

Sun and IBM held a joint press conference today to announce that IBM will extend support for Solaris x86 to most of Big Blue’s x86 server offerings. IBM will distribute Solaris x86 and basically support it like any other x86 operating system. Sun will provide service and maintenance for the operating system, and both companies will spend money to qualify and test systems to ensure full compatibility and performance. You can find the joint press release here, and some pretty good analysis from The Register here (yeah, I’m linking to them because they quoted me.) So now that the “official” details are stipulated, let’s into discussion