Hilton has been speaking at the VMworld conference in San Francisco this week about the challenges he faces as an IT decision maker of a major enterprise. His account makes for insightful reading – and covers a set of challenges all too familiar to his peer group.
On security:
“I was saying to somebody just the other day, I actually believe that we need to start viewing the data center network as untrusted. We’ve just got to the point we’re viewing our LAN, our office network, we’re viewing as untrusted."
On hybrid clouds:
And while hybrid cloud is something that is worth considering, Hilton isn’t keen on the idea of OpenStack: “My answer’s no. It’s not worth it. I’ve got 15,000, 20,000 VDI systems running on VMware. I’ve got probably another 30,000 virtual servers, 25,000 to 30,000. I like having a single fabric. It’s very important to have a single fabric. If I go back and go OpenStack, that’s not where the money is. “The money is in my people having to build, having to certify, and run it and operate it. The money we spend with integrated stack like VMware pays for itself, magnitudes, like hundreds of times when it comes to my people’s cost to run it.”
Often the faster an algorithm can be put into the market, the more advantage it has. Many algorithms have a shelf life and quicker time to market is key in taking advantage of that. With the community around Java and the options available, it can definitely be a competitive advantage, as opposed to C or C++ where the options may not be as broad for the use case. Sometimes, though, pure low latency can rule out other concerns. I think currently, the difference in performance between Java and C++ is so close that it's not a black and white decision based solely on speed. Improvements in GC techniques, JIT optimizations, and managed runtimes have made traditional Java weaknesses with respect to performance into some very compelling strengths that are not easy to ignore.
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