Tune tastes nice and Escolar is served in fine french restaurants here.

Theres a nice little article over at the 360 blog here listing exactly what mobile operators frequently get wrong with their security architecture and execution. Once wonders if they understand the basics!

Theres a nice little article here (basic reg. required) contrasting VMware and Citrix XenServer, where the end user was forced to abandon VMware (their default choice) after suffering performance problems and after 6 months of back and forth with tech support and engineering at the vendor. In the end XenServer delivered 2x the real world performance on identical hardware with a default install. Not all workloads are equally well virtualized! N.

Re: unsupported trials.

If you'd dropped my company a line we'd have offered a supported trial with an allocated engineer (okay, time spent would depend partly on potential size of a deployment...) but you'd certainly have spent nothing finding out what the product could and could not do in a supported way. We'd probably both have learnt something, I love real-life tests :-) Sometimes there are benefits in NOT buying direct off the vendor's web store :-) End of outrageous plug! Oh, we also do VMware, I guess what Im saying is that deployment is about more than just the upfront sticker price of the product.
PK

it will provide free access to competitive technology, keep the established vendor(s) straight, and (eventually) will give rise to cross-platform management tools and frameworks.

At last it looks like there will be a free, supported, commercial-grade virtualization solution for those of us who dont have the budget for VMware and have been disappointed with Hyper-V and its predecessors.

I can only imagine this is unhappy news for VMware who surely must now take a reality check on their pricing. I sincerely hope they do not go the same way as Netscape, having 3 strong vendors in the market stops a lot of the kind of bad behavior you see from ERP, CRM, and BI vendors (you know who you are guys!). There was a balanced 2 minute comparison of Hyper-v, XenServer, and VMware over at the 360 blog here.

For the VMware, Xen, and Hyper-V fanboys (are there any Hyper-V fanboys yet?), calm down and take a tip from that blog:

"Providers of the core hypervisor technology will continue to play a game of technical leapfrog with one another for at least a couple of years, while those with a management, enterprise framework, or suite will claim more strategic long-term positions around "liquid infrastructure" or something else suitably bendy. What is most important right now is that you have the right information processing architecture, not any one particular product within it."

Theres a nice little article here that talks about this subject in a vendor-neutral way.

AG