Reading List and Keeping Current

Somebody recently asked me how I keep up-to-date with the changes in technology. The short answer is reading. The long answer is I read a lot of different materials. Most of my technical reading is online technical articles. Yes, I know that I am a dork, but I can't help myself, I love this stuff. Most of this reading is random, based on comments from the day's meetings, emails that go to the reading list, links from blogs or articles I am reading, etc. I have found that I can't store the information for too long, so it is best for me to be a bit reactive to where and what I will be discussing.

Like most tech geeks I consume reading materials from many devices. Right now I have both the Kindle and Nook apps loaded on my phone, laptop, Surface Pro, and Surface RT (this has been confiscated by my wife), and I have a Kindle, my wife has a Nook. I use all of these regularly depending on where I am. So onto the lists.

I am currently reading the following books:

4 Hour Body
Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play
The New Solution Selling
Lean Six Sigma for Dummies
A Cancer Therapy, Results of Fifty Cases
Hamlet
Expository Thoughts on the Gospels

I recently finished reading:

Pumpkin Plan Your Business
The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur
Being an Effective Executive
Lean, Agile and Six Sigma for IT Management
4 Hour Workweek
Holiness
The Complete Husband

Then of course, there are the books I am always reading:

Bible
The Encyclopedia of Golf

What are you reading? How do you stay up-to-date?

Why the Software Defined Data Center is Changing IT

At VMworld this week I was able to sit in a session that talked about a project to take a global bank from 17% virtualization to the Software Defined Data Center. The driver was pretty simple, take their 5 billion in IT spend and cut it in half. Easy right?

While virtualization is an obvious part of the equation, virtualization alone was not going to cut the budget in half. In order to speed the deployment of applications and increase agility for the business, a more commoditized approach to IT was necessary. The business needed to be able to consume IT on demand, with automated processes for every part of the service.

The approach was revolutionary in every way. Instead of deploying traditional storage systems, servers, and even data centers, they built a commodity based infrastructure that could scale at very low cost with little to know warning. They approach is designed to change everything about the way they do IT including staff roles, and budgeting. This approach would allow them to reduce their IT costs by almost 70%.

There were a lot of different technologies involved in achieving this, some of it still beta, but the results were real and validated by several independent financial and technical institutions (think Gartner etc, although I can't recall the exact companies, so don't quote me on that). More details about this solution will become available as they continue to move more into production but the results are a great example of what private cloud enables, especially with a software defined approach to everything. 

What Are You Using to Run XenDesktop?

For your XenDesktop deployment, do you run vSphere, XenServer, or Hyper-V? Let me know.

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Oracle on Microsoft? Can it be?

Microsoft and Oracle announced a partnership allowing full support of Oracle products on Hyper-V and Azure. You can read the full announcement here http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/Jun13/06-24WSNewsPR.aspx. It will be interesting to see how this affects the adoption of Hyper-V and Azure as the platform for these enterprise workloads. This is good news for Oracle users and it shows a commitment from Oracle to support your infrastructure decisions and seems to be a much warmer embrace of virtualization than we have seen in the past. So the real question, will you be testing Oracle on Hyper-V or Azure soon?