The ball hit the net but from which side. Can you tell? Over the past three years, companies have pushed themselves to the cloud for many reasons but have they landed in the wrong side of the net?

Many companies have mistaken moving to the cloud for a goal to be achieved and it is natural to make that mistake. Companies see the bottom line, that building services in PAAS or IAAS clouds lowers the costs of bootstrapping risky projects, speeds up time to market and enables greater flexibility. They naturally make moving everything to the cloud a business target.

They miss that driving these benefits are the ways that automation and infrastructure as a service force the modernization and industrialization of a company’s IT teams and processes. Even if a company isn’t using any modern software driven deployment techniques, it is the industrialization of infrastructure on the provider’s side that allows a “machine” to be spec’ed, purchased, racked, cabled, and installed at the push of a button or the call of an API. It is this change in the way that IT works that is improving the bottom line, speeding time to market and increasing the business agility.

I had an idea. That’s always how it starts. Before I know it, I’ve purchased the domain name and I’m futzing around with some HTML but where am I going to host it and how much is this going to end up costing me?

That’s where I was when I came up with#DonateMyFee. “This is a site that is only going to cost me money”, I thought to myself (the whole point is for people to donate money rather than paying me). I really didn’t want to start shelling out big (or small) bucks on hosting.

Long story short, here is the recipe for a screaming fast website on a low budget:

Some of you may know that our daughter, Hadar, was born visually impaired. She is very nearsighted in a way that cannot be corrected with glasses and, as a result, her childhood has been very different from that of her older brothers. What normal children learn naturally from their environment passes outsideher field of vision. We had to learn quickly to adapt and that’s how we found ELIYA.

ELIYA runs programs to help blind or visually impaired children from 6 months to 6 years old, and their families. Their expert staff of teachers, therapists, and assistants with their decades of experience have helped Hadar close the developmental gaps between her and other children her age. They have given her tools and confidence to overcome her disadvantages. The growth we’ve seen as her parents is miraculous and we are sure that we couldn’t have gotten to this point on our own.

To say thank you for their wonderful work, I am offering my consulting services and asking that you donate my fees to ELIYA. They have Israeli, US, and UK organizations in case one is better for you than others. If you or your company are interested, please message me for details. (Of course you can just donate for the sake of giving to a good cause also.)

Oracle announced their new line of Sun SPARC T3 powered servers at Oracle Openworld 2010. The SPARC T3 processor includes several improvements on T2 and T2+ processors...

All in all they have packed more T-Series goodness in a smaller package but I'm not making goo-goo eyes yet.

As a platform for consolidating tens of smaller applications, the thread to RAM ratio is too low making it hard to get 100% utilization out of these servers. With the T3-4 servers loading even more processing power into a single machine, the thread to machine ratio high as well.

One Stop Shop is a dream for IT people. Support is hard enough to get when you've isolated a problem to a specific vendor. It is even harder when your problems are between two vendors and each points the finger at the other.

When does the One Stop Shop strategy become a rationalization for Vendor Lock-In? It is a delicate balance around how much better your IT could be with Best of Breed vs. how much worse they will be integrating all the different pieces of the puzzle.