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Jun 11 2009   8:29PM GMT

Cisco hires Christofer Hoff as virtualization director



Posted by: Colin Steele
Cisco, VMware, EMC, news, data center, cloud computing, Colin Steele

Cisco Systems has a new virtualization and cloud computing director: Christofer Hoff, the security and virtualization expert and popular blogger.

Hoff, aka “Beaker,” runs the Rational Survivability blog and has held high-ranking security positions at several IT vendors and other firms — albeit none as big as Cisco. They include Unisys, Crossbeam Systems and the WesCorp federal credit union.

His hiring at Cisco comes as the networking giant is making its move into the virtualization and data center markets with its Unified Computing System.

Continued »

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Feb 25 2009   2:14AM GMT

VMware CIO puts kibosh on my VMware-as-cloud-provider suspicions



Posted by: Alex Barrett
VMworld Europe, VMware, East Wenachtee, Columbia River, cloud computing, data center, Tayloe Stansbury

Ever since I learned last summer that VMware had leased a massive 100,000 square feet of data center space along the Columbia River in East Wenachtee, Wash., I’ve always assumed that they would eventually become a cloud computing provider, and not just a provider of the underlying cloud infrastructure software. Turns out I was wrong.

At a lovely dinner for press and analysts at L’ecrin in Cannes tonight, I had the pleasure of speaking with VMware’s CIO Tayloe Stansbury, who assured me that the company has no designs on becoming a cloud provider. Not that they didn’t consider it. But the more they thought about it, the more they came to the conclusion that it would be reckless to compete with their partners (folks like Savvis, T-Systems and Terremark), Stansbury said.

So what are they doing with that ginormous data center in East Wenachtee? Testing and development, pure and simple. “It’s one of the ironies of being VMware that we have to develop our code on physical hardware,” Stansbury said. In order to assure that ESX can effectively virtualize workloads on any x86 system, VMware’s R&D must test the code against every conceivable server and storage platform. These days, all that hardware is being shipped to East Wenachtee, where it runs on electricity that costs two cents per kilowatt hour, versus the 20 – 30 cents per kilowatt hour VMware pays for power in the places like Palo Alto and Cambridge, Mass.

So I stand corrected (it won’t be the first time). Going forward, I hope VMware decides to share further details about its new data center.

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