ReadWriteWeb

Ever since human beings landed on the moon, the state of technology in government appeared to be on a downward slope. Never mind that it was really the U.S. Government that facilitated the original Internet; in public sector offices, the state of computing started lagging behind the private sector ever since IBM mass-produced the microcomputer.

That slope may have bottomed out two years ago, with the urgent need to cut costs, reform practices and save jobs leading to an extraordinarily rapid adoption by federal and state governments of private cloud infrastructure. Now a government IT survey commissioned by MeriTalk, and funded by Microsoft and NetApp, reveals the extent of progress: Among just the agencies whose IT managers were surveyed, federal, state and local governments report saving a total of about $15 billion from their fiscal year 2011 budgets.

In the space of a year Precise, Software, a midsized provider of application management technologies based in Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv, Israel completely transformed its IT infrastructure to virtualization and cloud software, saving more than $2 million of its annual IT costs. This reduction came through cutting half of their IT staff and closely examining a variety of other technologies.

To talk about the top trends on the Web as it relates to political unrest is a bit misleading. There were not trends, so much as there was the strengthening of a single trend that has been operant since before I started following online free speech in January of 2005. The tools of the social web have been used at a higher rate, and more in the public eye, than ever before, by both proponents, and opponents, of change.

The tug-of-war between governments and those agitating for change has been profound this year, and global. A case could be made that in 2011, those working for change have scored more points than their opponents. It's important to remember, though, that the political struggle between those who wish to speak freely and those who wish to shut them up is like professional gambling. The overall chip count is what matters, not who's up at any given point. The count overall remains dead even.

Research from Principled Technologies suggests that a large UNIX/RISC-based, business-critical database application handling peaks of 10,000 queries per hour is delivering good performance. Using that metric, Principled Technologies set about testing 12 VMs hosted on a server running VMware vSphere 5.0 using the Intel Xeon E7 processor family.

How did it handle? According to Principled Technologies, "this solution comfortably supported 12 80GB databases" without over-committing resources and allowing all VMs to run in parallel with solid performance.

When you're in the process of establishing your cloud architecture, figuring out what can be moved to the cloud, and when it should be moved, is job one. That can seem like a daunting task, depending on the size of your organization, the number of applications in use, the complexity of your network architecture, and so on. But it's not as hard as it first seems. You can kick start your cloud migration by looking for applications that share some or all of these five characteristics:

1. Apps that are already virtualized
2. Apps that are loosely coupled and modular in their design
3. Apps that have low requirements for privacy and security
4. Apps that can tolerate latency
5. Apps that are unencumbered by regulatory requirements

The moment many of you have been waiting for is here. We're pleased to announce the last two winners of the MacBook Air contest! Give a big hand to Aaron Meyers and Marshall May! If you're not Meyers or May, don't lose hope: We're extending the last MacBook Air contest for 2011 through Thanksgiving Weekend.

Meyers, senior business systems analyst for a government contractor, responded to "tell us how you won management over to virtualization." Meyers provided an in-depth response that contest judge Roger Levy, SVP of product at Engine Yard, deamed worthy of a MacBook Air.

The ability to migrate virtual machines from one physical server to another is a key reason businesses are choosing virtualization. Whether the migrations are for routine maintenance, balancing performance needs, work distribution (consolidating VMs onto fewer servers during non-peak hours to conserve resources), or another reason, the best virtual infrastructure platform executes the move as quickly as possible and with minimal impact to end users.

Principled Technologies tested VMware vSphere 5 vMotion against Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 with Hyper-V Live Migration. According to Principled Technologies, VMware was faster, had greater stability and less impact on application performance.

When NYSE Technologies launched its Capital Markets Community Platform it was heading into uncharted territory. As its first cloud platform, it would support a vast ecosystem of clients including small and large banks and asset managers, allowing them to create new products and services that will help decrease friction and costs in global trading. To learn more, check out this video, in which Kirk Skaugen from Intel, Stanley Young from NYSE Technologies and Steve Herrod from VMware discuss this groundbreaking cloud computing platform.

What workloads are you running under virtualization, and what are you holding back?

That's the question for ReadWriteCloud's October contest. Virtualization providers like VMware and hardware partners like Intel say that almost all workloads are suitable for virtualization. What workloads are you running under virtualzation today, and what are you holding back? Do you have workloads you're worried about moving to virtualization? If so – why?

Each time ReadWriteWeb holds a live chat with an expert panel, we get more attendees than the time before, and Tuesday was no exception. But not everyone gets a chance to show up and submit a question. If you missed us Tuesday, engineers Steven Shultz from VMware and Mitch Shults from Intel (that's right, the tag team of Shultz and Shults) discussed the difficulties folks have in moving heavy-workload, mission-critical data centers from a physical to a virtual environment.