Posts Tagged ‘Technovation’

The differences between IT outsourcing and Cloud Computing

I was recently asked by a journalist for my thoughts on the differences between traditional IT infrastructure outsourcing and “Cloud Computing”. When you get down to it, there are only really three differences between the two, but that does not stop Cloud being a significant threat to the old-guard of IT consultancies.

Twitter becomes… IRC!

Twitter recently announced that they would be removing replies to people you do not follow from the timeline. In my view, and that of just about everyone I know and follow, that is highly undesirable and eliminates a large part of what was unique about Twitter. Now it has taken a giant leap back in time to IRC-days.

(Deprecated) The definition of cloud computing

This post has now been superseded by my updated

Sweat the desktops, replace the servers

People keep going around and around in circles on the debate of whether you should replace servers and desktops sooner rather than later when you take into account the improvements in energy efficiency in recent years combined with the embedded energy cost of manufacture of computers. So, I decided to get out my calculator and [...]

Eco-friendliness: Plant trees or build nukes?

We recently became the first UK Web host to be Carbon Neutral accredited, but does it actually make a real difference? In fact, are we going about all this wholesome planet-saving the right way at all? As an aside, our arch-rivals over at RackSpace claimed they were the first UK Web host to be carbon [...]

Open Source: The un-eaten free-lunch

There is such a thing as a free lunch, and it is called open sauce software! Er, open source even. Did I forget breakfast again? Anyway! I am constantly surprised that, despite its massive and growing use in many areas, open source software solutions, and the benefits therein, are either unknown or shunned even by [...]

Mobile working – have I cracked it?

I’m frequently out and about and on trains (usually between Guildford and London), and always try to make good use of the time. The ability to work anywhere is important to me, and I think I might have finally cracked it! Up until recently I had been using a massive Dell Inspiron 9100, which is [...]

Horribly expensive hardware

“So, do you use Cisco firewalls as well as routers?”, asks the client; “No, actually.” is our response. Why, you might ask? Surely if you are running over a thousand servers and managing hundreds of individual firewalls you must be using Cisco or some other branded “firewall appliance”? But why must we? What is so [...]

Getting value for Wattage

Power is becoming ever more of an issue for data centres, and the prices keep on going up – doubling in the last two years! Not only that, but the energy ends up as heat, which then has to be air-conditioned (add another 30% to the electricity bill), and then it all just wafts into [...]