"There's a cloud for that." – IT Management & Cloud Podcast #49

Download the episode directly right here, subscribe to the feed in iTunes or other podcatcher to have episodes downloaded automatically, or just click play below to listen to it right here:

This week, John and I meander around several topics:

• Baltimore fun facts: umbrellas.
• Google building a data center in Belgium.
• New restaurant update: Frank in Austin (“hot dogs, cold beer”), glazed donut burgers in Atlanta (like this?).
• Hadoop, The Definitive Guide – a pre-reading book review.
• The “Lean IT” meme – from CA, or Forrester? See a FAQ here.
• And this leads me to ask: has the phrase “BSM” and “business service delivery” talk flipped the bozo bit for marketing talk? John remembers some tales in this area.
• John tells us The Good News about BSM, tough-love version. You’ve got have your plumbing fixed before applying “BSM in a box,” but how well does “fix your plumbing in a box” sell?
• John’s review of a recent Gartner webcast on CIO priorities and performance.
• John’s DMTF wanderings – OVM, OVF, vSphere deployment. Maybe Winston Bumpus. XML templates for virtual appliances.
• Dealing with PR email, embargo’s, etc. For bed time reading, see the infamous TechCrunch take on embargoes.
• Rivermuse launchy – event management, correlation, etc. What is this “event management” anyhow? John says SMARTS is dandy here.
• Our man William over at Oracle has been doing nice stuff on his blog of late, lots of details on how all this IT Management gorp should be designed. I esp. like this line from one post in his series on REST in IT Management: “I can think of ways in which some REST principles would help in this area, but they are mainly along the lines of ‘any consistent set of principles would help’ rather than anything specific to REST.” Yuh! Sidenote: (a.) “REST” is an idea like “Democracy” or “Christianity,” good luck getting any agreement on what it actually looks like in practice, and (b.) better luck having the canonical use be practical.
• memcache meme – Gear6, North Scale, so on and so forth. Seems like it’s on the open source enterprise creep-in path.
• IBM buying SPSS – John’s SAS memories – also see James Governor’s take on the buy.
• Tech books – what do we have?
• New T-shirt slogan: “there’s a cloud for that.” re: Rackspace private cloud.
• Tell us what books and fun facts and cities you like on the #ITMguys.

Disclosure: many folks mentioned are clients, see the RedMonk clients list for which ones.