If you think two-thirds of your IT is mission-critical, you're either running an incredibly lean and efficient operation or you haven't got a clue how many applications you have and which ones you need to manage.
You've only got to hang around a datacentre for about 30 seconds before someone starts raving on about virtualisation. While the cost benefits of virtualisation are obvious, the management challenges often get swept under the carpet.
Datacentres are by their nature somewhat sterile and antiseptic places, but many of them hide a dirty little secret: cables so tangled they make the plots of Days Of Our Lives look logical by comparison.
Managers in charge of storage have a lot to worry about, but there seems no particular reason why people in this corner of the world should be more concerned about security than anything else. Why is it that securing our data matters more to us than accessing it?
Some future trends in storage are obvious: we'll need more of it, it'll be cheaper per megabyte, and a lot of it will be virtualised.
More than a week has passed since EMC boss Joe Tucci answered some of my questions on virtualisation, and I'm still pondering them.
It's nigh on impossible to hear a bad word about virtualisation software at the moment, but is it good news for everyone?
In the Australian market, banks are the archetypal large IT customer: they've got lots of technology of differing vintages, have to spend a fortune on services to stitch it all together, and are also obliged to meet a super-strict regulatory regime which would make most lesser enterprises quake in their virtualised boots.
My recent rant about the horrors of Adobe Acrobat's update process attracted a fair degree of sympathy, but also managed to royally annoy at least one Big Deal reader, who questioned what it had to do with the column's stated intention of illuminating issues central to IT managers.
There were some interesting responses to my analysis piece last week about Apple's new Boot Camp Windows-on-Mac software, but all the evidence still points in one direction...
Telstra shareholders fear break up
What do Telstra shareholders think of the telco's new CEO David Thodey? And would they support the government'… Watch it now
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