Custom Application Development: Buy, Build or Ignore?:

Virtualization

Jun 30 2008   6:47PM GMT

On the way to Green IT



Posted by: Joe Coley
Virtualization, Green IT, IT Management

Green IT — you’ve read and heard a lot about it recently.  Green (whatever) is the color of the day, week - indeed future.

However, I can’t help but think about all the trees we were going to save by having our computers do all the work for us, and then present results without paper!  Remember the paperless office?  Talk about the paperless society?  …and wouldn’t paperless be a good green initiative?  The paperless office sounded like a good idea at the time, but I venture to say that for most companies efforts to be paperless have gone stagnant - and why is that?

Could it be that perhaps it just doesn’t work?  Could it be that people still want to read or skim over printed pages rather than fuss with a mouse, or read something on a screen limited in its display, and positioned (normally) very differently than say when one reads a book or newspaper?  Have you ever seen someone curled up comfortably in their easy chair reading a computer?  I for one have not!

While I believe we have made great strides in some areas toward minimizing paper use with programs such as on-line libraries of scanned business documents, B2B invoicing, data warehousing and “Business Intelligence - given the increase in data now available because of our faster, more powerful computers I submit that perhaps at best we’re holding our own.  The additional computing power and data analysis has meant mroe computers, which of course means more energy — so we now add in virtualization of said servers - and the cycle starts again.  First we had a prolific growth in physical servers, now it’s virtualized servers - and software wanting to run on its own server spurs more growth. 

Of course there’s also the other green - the long green (aka US $).  We want to do all this “greening” without spending the long green.  Most “green” initiatives don’t save money in the short term, and in the economy of today investment in the long term is limited due to short funds.

Finally there’s the last “green” I’ll refer to — that of the “green” with envy kind of green, also known in a previous era as “keeping up with the Jones’s”.  The Jones’s have something that you perceive as good - so you want it!  So what if it uses up more resources.  While there is a lot at stake for us as a global society by “going green”, I’m seeing much talk, but little action.  Shifting from one resource drain (such as power consumption) to another (such as serving up twice as much paper in printed documents) hardly seems green to me.

Mar 24 2008   12:48PM GMT

Spending the Day with Microsoft



Posted by: Joe Coley
Software application development, Database, Development, Custom software development, Database application, Software testing, SQL Server, Virtualization

Last week I had the opportunity to spend the day with Microsoft at their Heroes happen {here} Microsoft 2008 Launch Wave in Boston.  Evidence of Microsoft’s commitment to virtualization were plentiful.  Many of the demonstrations they provided, clearly were accessing virtualized machines.  Application virtualization was not quite as prominently noticeable however I understand one session which I did not attend, their session on virtualization in your infrastructure, did show application virtualization on Windows Server 2008.

I chose to follow the presentations provided in the “developers track” — surprise, surprise?  Microsoft managed to provide information sessions, for the most part, rather than vailed sales pitches — I commend them on that.  Of course, the greatest percentage of sessions and information provided were really geared toward the larger enterprise customers.

It’s always difficult to know after shows like this just what value I have gained from the time spent.  It probably will be a while before I truly understand the value to me, however, having the opportunity to work with the provided Not for Resale software — Server 2008, SQL 2000 and Visual Studio 2008 — I’m sure will provide value to me in the coming months.


Mar 17 2008   2:26PM GMT

Virtualization Revisited



Posted by: Joe Coley
Custom software development, Business process automation, Software testing, Networking, Virtualization, Software application development

With much anticipation I find myself preparing my laptop once again to be used as a tool to demonstrate capabilities of software which I developed.  This is no ordinary preparation.  I will soon start an extended road trip during which I will be doing both development and demonstrations.  Last October I wrote in this blog about how valuable virtualization has become in my environment.  Since then, it has become an even more powerful tool which I use daily.  My use of virtualization technology has become a staple component of my development environment. Continued »


Oct 21 2007   1:58AM GMT

Software Development, Testing, Quality and Virtualization



Posted by: Joe Coley
Software testing, Virtualization, Business process automation, Custom software development, Software Quality

I honestly don’t know how I managed to ever complete a software development project prior to virtualization.  Although as I think about it more closely, I realize that the way I did it was to maintain a plethora of workstations, each with another O/S on it, and used only occasionally.  It certainly was NOT a “green” solution.  Now I carry a complete (enough for testing) network on my laptop!  Using virtualization my “laptop” network consists of a WIN2003 Server, WIN2000 Server, XP Pro, Linux and XP Home.  These are the O/S’s I need to test my applications with — and they are all now available to me on my Vista laptop used as virtualization host.  Continued »