It seems an apt question for the current times. Some businesses have fully embraced opensource, others have steered well clear of it. The pros and cons have been hotly contested, usually by people with an agenda, if not an axe to grind. Regardless of your historic stance, now is the right time to be looking at how to cut IT costs.

A blogger-in-technology that has much to say about the matter is JP Rangaswami of BT Design, and rightly so. His confused of calcutta blog is a firm favourite of mine, and of many others. “Learning about why people don’t adopt opensource” is a long, but worth-while read that circumnavigates many of the issues around open source software. It is in two halves. The first speaks to why people don’t use opensource:

They hate the principle.

They believe it’s insecure.

They’re out of their comfort zone.

They know a better way.

They don’t know about it.

They can’t do what they want with it.

The move represents serious operational risk. [more...]

As far as the network is concerned, F5 Networks have become part of the furniture for most hosting providers, and I mean that in a good way. Load balancing across multiple servers has progressed a long way since the early days of Cisco’s Local Director, and Checkpoint’s early load balancing capabilities. F5 have evolved too. A number of acquisitions now puts them in a strong position in the market, and with a broad range of products and technologies to offer to customers. [more...]

A comment from Chris of Cohesiveft, reminded me that an update is due on London CloudCamp. The notional October meeting is now actually happening in November, details here. It kicks off at 6pm with drinks and registration, followed by a series of lightening talks, then 3 ‘open spaces’ discussions. Expect a who’s who of the UK Cloud Computing world. [more...]

This week finds me in Storage Expo, held at London’s Olympia. With compliance issues, data retention legislation, and data discovery all swirling around the IT press over the last year, it is hardly a surprise that the who’s who of the IT industry is here.

Despite what you read about IT cutbacks, the floors are packed with people catching up with the latest developments in the storage industry. Some are more human that others of course. Still, a friendly chap. Symantec is just one of the big names about. [more...]

Next in the series of Interviews from IP08 is Meru Networks. US-Based Meru sits in the unusual situation of being a company that no-one has heard of, but everyone talks about. I’ll explain why in a bit, but first a little background on this wireless player.

Meru has a strong engineering bent and a strategic outlook – Gartner has placed them in the visionary section of their magic quadrant for WLAN. Meru recently started to build out their presence in the UK and Europe, hiring a seasoned team of professionals to help them out. They’ll need them, as they have a fight on their hands: The age-old Cisco versus best of breed player battle. It is a familiar battle. When you have a networking requirement the default networking vendor always has a big head start. A point not lost on David Kelly, Meru’s head of Sales in EMEA, and former Cisco old hand himself. [more...]