VMWorld 2009 TweepUp @ The Chieftains on Saturday 8/29 @ 5:30p

I’m organizing a TweetUp for the folks coming to VMWorld 2009. It’ll take place at The Chieftain Irish Pub on the corner of 5th Street and Howard (across from InterContinental Hotel). So come out and hang out with your #VMWorld tweeps and enjoy great draft beer & pub food.

The Chieftain is offering the following drink specials:

$3 PBR
$4 Mimoas
$5 Bloody Mary

I’ve posted the event on Facebook. Please RSVP so I can give the Pub a rough headcount. Current this event isn’t sponsored. Email me if you’re interested in sponsoring it.

The count down to VMWorld 09

The etherspace has been busy with highlights, tips, and expectations of VMWorld 09 taking place at the Moscone center in SF starting August 31. I’d like to chime in and highlight technology areas that I’ll be focusing on while I’m there next week.

Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS)

Cisco’s entry into the server computing realm by providing a platform that unifies network, compute, storage access, and virtualization resources. A “wall of UCS” at VMWorld will showcase 16 racks containing 64 chassis, 512 blades, 4096 cores, & 24 TB of memory. This is where the VMWorld labs are run out of and it is expected that ~1500 users will be accessing the UCS systems at any given time through VMware View.

Here’s a video of what the rack looks like at the Moscone:

VMware View and Cisco WAAS

As remote desktop technologies gain adoption throughout enterprises, Cisco’s WAAS & ACE products ensure availability & performance when users access their remote desktop images through VMware View. (more…)

Painting the Cisco Unified Computing vision and the steps to go there…

Wanted to share my thoughts around the launch of Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and my thoughts around what Unified Computing means to me (more…)

Speaking of Click Fraud

Here’s a nice continuation to my blog post on click fraud associated online advertising. Apparently Microsoft is working on a new way to measure the effectiveness of online ads. “Engagement Mapping” attempts to take into account all the Internet interactions that lead a consumer to buy a product and give advertisers a more accurate assessment of how to plan a campaign online. (more…)

Fradulent Clicks on the Internet

Came across an interesting article today on TechCrunch that talks about the growth in click-fraud rate. According to the research, nearly 2 out of 3 clicks on Google or Yahoo ads are fraudulent. While that statistic is daunting, it’s not surprising. Many Internet sites have built their revenue models around serving ads. The formula is simple: generate good content; optimize it for search engines to drive hit rate; serve up ads; rinse and repeat. Execution is often not as simple as one must have compelling content as a starting point. Digg and Plentyoffish have been some of the top revenue generators with reported earnings as high as 901k per month from Plentyoffish. (more…)

application availability monitoring

The availability of any enterprise application is only as good as the monitoring solutions utilized. The reason being that a well thought out / well deployed monitoring solution not only detects when an application has failed to respond to requests, it can also take steps to being remedy the problem without involving human intervention. The last thing any admin wants to be waken up at 3a only to hit the restart button for the downed service. (more…)

packet capture repository

Ever asked yourself the question of “I wonder what a trace of my favorite application protocol looks like”? I did that today and found myself browsing through the collection of sample packet captures on wireshark.org. The collection is quite impressive. There are nearly 50 categories of packet captures available, from HTTP to NTP to SQL to IPSec to Kerberos. You can even check out a capture of a slammer worm! Anyway, I thought this is a great resource and want to pass it on.

Linux Files System Encryption

Encryption of files on a server is often the last gate in keeping unauthorized users from gaining access to sensitive data. File-level encryption is prevalent with tools like PGP. Unfortunately file-level encryption still exposes the OS structure of a server to the hacker. Plus, managing the encryption/decryption of individual files can be expense from a system resource perspective. An alternative would be to encrypt the entire file system and perform the encryption/decryption at the file system level on the fly. (more…)