Jason Brooks

[WP_IMAGE] This week in the lab we’re testing the latest virtualization and cloud management offerings from Convirture, ConVirt Enterprise 3.0 and ConVirt Enterprise Cloud. Last year, I reviewed version 2.0 of ConVirt Enterprise, a product aimed at bolstering the hypervisor capabilities that come with every Linux server product these days with vSphere-style management capabilities. ConVirt […]

[WP_IMAGE] Last week, the latest version of Ubuntu, the popular Linux-based operating system from Canonical, hit FTP mirrors everywhere. The new release, called version 11.10 (or, for the more dreamily-minded, Oneiric Ocelot), ships with the typical slate of updated open source packages, which is par for the course for any Linux distribution upgrade. In terms […]

While Linux-based operating system Ubuntu has been closely associated with the desktop, the project’s server variant has grown more prominent in recent years, particularly in the context of cloud computing. With a lack of any license fees and a focus on cloud features from its primary sponsor, Canonical, Ubuntu has flourished in the cloud, becoming […]

[WP_IMAGE] At its Oracle OpenWorld 2011 conference this week, database giant Oracle gave the burgeoning NoSQL database market a shot in the arm, with the announcement of its own NoSQL database product. During my research for a recent eWEEK feature on the topic, I noticed that the marketing materials for the various NoSQL contenders contained […]

Facebook’s ongoing evolution, the latest phase of which was on display at the social networking giant’s F8 conference last week, merits the attention of enterprise IT departments, in part because, as Salesforce.com’s recent Dreamforce conference illustrated, today’s consumer-targeted social features have a way of turning up in tomorrow’s enterprise applications. [WP_IMAGE] More important, though, than […]

Keynote’s Mobile Internet Testing Environment, or MITE, is a desktop-based performance testing tool that measures the performance of mobile Websites from a large range of mobile devices. Given the diversity of mobile devices represented among companies’ employees and customers, MITE can help developers ensure that their Web-based applications function properly for as many mobile users […]

I recently had the opportunity to catch up with SUSE, where things are now settling downfollowing the Attachmate acquisition of the Linux vendor’s parent, Novell, last spring. Under Attachmate, SUSE and Novell are now operating as separate business units, an arrangement that appears to be sharpening SUSE’s focus. On the server side, the company is […]

The point of platform as a service is to enable developers to focus solely on their application code and data, leaving the maintenance of the underlying stack to the service provider. One of the biggest potential problems with this approach is that of lock-in: Moving from one PaaS (platform as a service) to another, in […]

Over the past few years, NoSQL databases have received a great deal of attention, with countless attestations of their virtues in enabling consumer-facing, Web-based businesses to manage fast-growing user demand and make use of the huge quantities of data that their users create. It’s clear that NoSQL adoption has paid dividends to the Twitters and […]

Last week, I spoke with Eric Lundquist about the product announcements out of VMware’s VMworld 2011 and Saleforce.com’s Dreamforce 2011 on the CIO Insight show: [youtube id=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gt7dn88pMk]