Today's debriefing podcast (download here or subscribe to the feed)mentioned: my quick take on Microsoft and Nokia using jQuery, a brief note on seeing LogLogic's new community portal and some basic tips on boot-strapping such sites, Hyperic's HQ 4.0 Beta (with lengthy commentary on IT management agents behind the firewall and JMX browsing and monitoring), cubicles vs. offices, and then a brief mention of a piece on capacity management for cloud computing that I sent off to SearchDataCenter.com today.

(There's a weird skip in the audio right at the beginning: don't worry, you didn't miss anything.)

Disclosure: Hyperic and Loglogic are clients.

Episode 4 of the GreenMonk Podcasts - 36 mins 28 secs

My guest on this podcast is Strato’s Executive Director for Information Technology and Innovation Rene Wienholtz.

Strato are Europe’s second largest hosting company and Strato are also carbon neutral! Amazingly they achieved this without buying any offsets. How did they do it?

Listen to René explain it.

Here are the questions I asked René and the approx. times I asked them:


Can you tell us something about your own background first and who are Strato? - 00:34

If I heard you correctly you are now the largest hosting company in Europe? - 02:28

You guys are a bit like RackSpace in the sense that you don't do co-location, you rent space on your servers, id that right? - 02:38

You mentioned that you decided to re-architect the setup in Strato and reduce your carbon footprint, was this for environmental reasons or business reasons? - 03:34

Questions from readers:




Do you use underfloor plenums as well to direct the air to the cold aisles? - 21:47

Can you talk to us too about the energy savings you are getting from buying CO2 free energy? - 25:44

Have you negotiated a set price from your clean energy supplier for a set period? - 29:36

Can you tell me how long this price is guaranteed for? - 30:15

Have you had any independent 3rd party certify that you are carbon neutral? - 30:27



More questions from readers:

Download the episode directly right here, or subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically.

This week John and I return to our laxidasical agenda, covering a disparate range of topics:

• I start out asking John about The IT Skeptic's recent book and new website, since John mentioned it to me the other day.
• The myCMDB screencast I recorded this week leads us to start talking about CMDBs in general. Keep your eyes peels for that screencast here soon.
• Having met with a local Planview-ite, I talk about project and portfolio management in IT Management; namely, that it ain't too sexy in IT Management but sure seems valuable as far as tracking cash. Also, this reminds me of BMC's recent ITM buy.
• John asks me my opinion of when you should and shouldn't virtualize, which launches me off into a long soliloquy on the topic. The primary suggestion is for IT departments to focus on operation efficiencies over anything else: vendors are going to figure out how to make the same amount, if not more, money, so cost savings will be temporary from that front - don't fall into Moore's Law fantasy on that front. The real benefits have to come from people saving time and being more effective.
• Having attended the IBM zSummit analyst event, I give a short update on how IBM is talking about it's cloud engagements. John and I still agree that IBM needs a cloud product, but from my perspective they've improved greatly since the "don't call it a come-back, I've been here for years" messaging at Pulse.
• Finally, I give my brief take on PacketTrap's newly released Perspective product: what I call a "general IT Management Platform," something that monitors and manages anything with an IP address, including applications and middleware.

And, there's of course more, including an opening discussion of U.B. Funkeys and kidrobot figurines at the Austin branch of the hipster bookstore Domy.

And, check out the sponsor for this episode:

At ITKnowledgeExchange.com, engage in a community of IT peers like yourself, asking and answering their toughest IT questions. Visit ITKnowledgeExchange.com today.

Disclosure: Managed Objects, BMC, and IBM are clients. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.

Today's debriefing podcast (download here or subscribe to the feed) goes over a couple briefings I had - with PERFMAN and Etelos - some interesting news items from Adobe and Microsoft-land I came across, the recent Apple iPhone App Store hubbub (and get off on a long tear about open source and making money off software), and closes out with a short note on the cloud computing book I'm looking to start-up with the cloud to everyone's silver-lining.

As I noted yesterday, I'm curious to hear if you like this format or if it's terrible for you. Thanks to Mark for chiming in and the NetQoS folks for the notice'ing on yesterday's.

Disclosure: Adobe and Microsoft are clients.

Since I haven't had the chance to blog in text form much of late, I thought I'd try a different medium: a short audio update. Download it directly here; you should also be able to subscribe to this blog's feed to download it as a podcast. In this "Debriefing" I primarily go over the conversations I had today with NetQoS, PacketTrap, and SpringSource. I also mention the rise in Surgient spottings I've been having of late.

Tell me if you like this format or think it's a waste of time.

Disclosure: SpringSource is a client.

Download the episode directly right here, or subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically.

As promised last week, we get back to topical news and commentary this week. John starts out talking about super computers briefly, then we discuss super computers. We then discuss Citrix (whose Santa Clara building is pictured above), 3Tera, and VMWare's recent cloud talk. I ask John how 3rd party cloud suppliers are tackling licensing for elastic deployments, we bump up against cloud standards, and we close out with me mentioning VDI stuff and asking how it "feels" to folks, like you, dear listeners.

We also squeek in talk of multi-core coding (see the Grady Booch video I mention) and how identity and IT management will, no doubt, find a lot of work all the buying up going on in the financial sector at the moment.

Identity management gold fields in financial world M&A

Download the episode directly here, or subscribe to the RIA Weekly RSS feed for automatic downloads of each episode.

In addition to talking with Zend's Andi Gutmans about the PHP/Flex announcement this morning at ZendCon, I had the chance to talk with Mike Potter of Adobe to hear their side of the story. In addition to going over the basics of the announcements - see the episode with Andi for a quick wrap-up - as you can guess, we spend more time talking about what AMF is and how it fits into the overall Flex and AIR world. Mike also gives us more detail on the tooling integration.

Additionally, we talk about new uses of Flex Mike has seen of late and talk about how appeal to the PHP community relates to the Java community relations Adobe has been doing for sometime.

Finally, having discovered that Mike is a big curling fan, I ask him to explain the game and some of the culture around it: you'll be pretty up to speed on the basics of curling once you're through with this episode ;>

Disclosure: Adobe is a client, as is Zend.

Download the episode directly here, or subscribe to the RIA Weekly RSS feed for automatic downloads of each episode.

Andi Gutmans tells us about the RIA related announcements at ZendCon this morning. First, he goes through the announcements:

• making the Zend Studio and Flex Builder work together in the present and targeting better integration, like debugging in the future
• Adobe's work and contribution to link up AMF to Zend-land
• And then ongoing education and evangelizing around PHP and Flex

Check out Andi's write-up on his blog as well.

We then discuss how PHP is primarily used in the RIA world, namely, as a gateway to the back-end for the UI layer. Along those lines, we discuss the existing use of PHP by Flex developers - Andi says Adobe told him 25% of Flex users are using PHP.

I ask Andi to talk about the types of applications that might benefit from this Adobe/Zend partnership: he cites intranet business applications, those that include multi-media interfaces, and also the Automotive Computer Services customer example cited in the press release around the announcement.

Finally, Andi being a self-proclaimed open source person, I ask him how he resolves the closed nature of Flex, namely, the Flash player. As we discus, while Adobe has opened up so much more of Flex, there's still that closed core. Bouncing of the idea of "if it works for you use it" we talk about other UI technologies, like Silverlight, that Zend may be interested in partnering more closely with if interests arises in the PHP community.

And, the previous episode we reference at the begining was indeed, from Microsoft MIX, episode #009b to be exact.

Disclosure: Zend and Adobe are clients, as are Microsoft and IBM.

Download the episode directly right here, or subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically.

In this fantastically rich episode, we talk with Jane Curry, of Skills 1st, about her recent evaluation of Nagios, OpenNMS, and Zenoss. This evaluation resulted in a 148 page draft paper, "Open Source Management Options," which we glide through in this episode, hitting on the pluses and minuses of each platform from the stand-point of looking for a network management platform.

Book-ending the discussion of Jane's paper, we first discuss some early history of Tivoli and network management in general. On the other end, we briefly talk about the recent spate of virtualization news (which we'll get to next week) and talk about my recent trip to Finland, pictured above.

Also, as you'll hear at the start, this episode is sponsored by ITKnowledgeExchange.com, so go check them out for getting answers to your toughest IT questions.

Disclosure: Zenoss is a client, as is IBM.

While I was away on vacation, James was good enough to record an RIA Weekly episode with SAP's Craig Cmehil.

Download the episode directly here, or subscribe to the RIA Weekly RSS feed for automatic downloads of each episode.

James and Craig start out talking about the upcoming SAP TechEd RIA hacker night (sponsored by RedMonk, among others). They then discuss Google Chrome and Craig's down-beat view on it, along with App Engine. James asks Craig about Silverlight uses he's seen in the field, and then they get into talking about wikis used as development platforms. Finally, they wrap-up talking about how RIAs have been used to make applications feel more human and collaborative.

Disclosure: SAP is a client, as are Adobe and Microsoft. See the RedMonk client list for other clients mentioned.