Bob Plankers

Bob Plankers is a man who wears many hats. In his professional career he has spent three decades leading teams that design, build, operate, and talk about reliable, secure, and compliant IT infrastructures, both in the public sector and in the high tech industry. He currently focuses on applied security, compliance, and operational resilience for virtualization and cloud platforms.

links for 2008-09-24

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DailyTech – Hackers Run Off With Data on 8 Million Best Western Customers "In what some are calling the biggest information heist in recent history, identity thieves managed to acquire a treasure chest of personal information on more than 8 million of hotel chain Best Western’s customers." Wonderful, this includes me. Hank Paulson's bailout 419 letter – Boing Boing "I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you." LOL.

Good Ideas and Lies

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Daring Fireball linked to Paul Krugman’s NY Times op-ed post which includes a great quote from Daniel Davies: “Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.” He was speaking of war, but it’s true of just about anything. Especially technology. A good idea just sells itself. The first thing that comes to my mind is the mudslinging that Microsoft and Citrix are doing lately over virtualization. Why is it that VMware has 80% of the market? Because it sells itself. I wonder why, instead of spending all this money on “get the facts” and “costs too much” web sites, Microsoft doesn’t just focus on why VMware keeps beating them, and fix …

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Hell Breaking Loose

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A great George Carlin quote came through today, via Quotes of the Day: “I’m not concerned about all hell breaking loose, but that a PART of hell will break loose… it’ll be much harder to detect.” As a system administrator that’s exactly the attitude I take on monitoring.

links for 2008-09-22

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Stevey's Blog Rants: Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret "What's the profile? The profile is this: non-touch-typists have to make sacrifices in order to sustain their productivity." Computer folks who cannot type well drive me nuts. Good essay. Freddie, Fannie, Get Off of My Cloud "Don't bother looking up a quote for the S&P 498. The index always calls up fresh rookies from the minors to take the place of its retirees. The new additions will be industrial and construction supplies specialist Fastenal (Nasdaq: FAST) and enterprise software darling salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM)." Fastenal is out of Winona, MN, where I have a bunch of relatives. Cool! Biologists hope to discover 'Darwin particle' with Giant Animal Smasher | Science Blog "Scientists from the …

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links for 2008-09-21

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Google in Pirate Google now has 'Pirate' as a language. Nice. Water Night for String Orchestra (With Recording!) « SoaringLeap.com A friend once sung Water Night at a concert and I loved it instantly. This is an interesting orchestral transcription of it, straight from the composer himself. Cool. Data Center Strategies: Microsoft's Mistake at VMWorld "I was shocked to hear that Microsoft passing out cards before Tuesday's VMworld keynote that stated 'Looking for your best bet? You won't find it with VMware.'" Me, too. While I didn't mind the $1 chip I thought it was pretty childish. It also makes me want to try Hyper-V now so I can blog about its faults.

Happy Talk Like A Pirate Day

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Did you hear about the new pirate movie coming out? It’s rated arrrrrr. Have a happy Talk Like A Pirate Day! Last year I was able to order grog at my local bar. This year I’m going to try for some bumboo, in order to avoid scurvy.

VMworld 2008 Day 2 General Session

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Dr. Stephen Herrod is the featured speaker of the VMworld 2008 day 2 general session. He’s the CTO & senior VP of R&D. This post will be more notes than a coherent piece. I’ll follow up with some thoughts later today. Goal of the infrastructure layer is to aggregate resources and be as efficient as possible. vCompute layer: things like FlexMigration. Focused on the VM, making it as powerful as possible. Grown from 2 vCPUs to a future 8 vCPUs, 40 Gbps, 256 GB per VM, 200000+ IOPS. Next generation of resource pools, up to 64 nodes in a single cluster, 4096 processor cores, 64 TB of RAM, 6 million IOPS, all running under DRS. Distributed Power Management continuing in …

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VMworld 2008 Keynote

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Considering that VMware was founded in 1998, 2008 is definitely the year when virtualization became a teenager. Announcements at VMworld are indicating a certain level of maturity in the thinking of vendors, in that they are solving problems and wrapping up a lot of the loose ends that have plagued virtual infrastructure implementations. By wrapping all those problems up it frees time to work on more interesting things, like clouds. On stage at VMworld 2008 Paul Maritz’ outlines the VMware strategy going forward. He commented that we’re moving away from a device- and hardware-centric world to one that is information- and people-centric. We’re also starting to think of our IT infrastructure as one giant computer. This is the basis behind …

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links for 2008-09-16

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skforlee – anti-theft lunch bag "Anti-Theft Lunch Bags are regular sandwich bags that have green splotches printed on both sides. After your sandwich is placed inside, no one will want to touch it." Intel releases Dunnington in all its 6-core glory! …and you can get them today in Dell R900s. Cool. Gotta love socket compatibility. The Intel 7400 series CPUs are definitely the sweetest CPUs around right now. RTFM Education » Blog Archive » VMware leaks staff… Said it as well or better than I would have: "Anyway, you never got a sense that Mendel was another Gates or Jobs. Whatever you think of departures, I think Mendal/Greene kitchen-table story will in years to come be one of those key …

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How To Identify VMworld Attendees

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Wondering if that other person in the elevator with you is a VMworld attendee? There are lots of clues: 1. Have they forgotten to take their conference badge off? A dead giveaway, for sure. 2. Are they carrying their blue & black VMworld bag? Also a dead giveaway. 3. Are they holding a folded piece of paper, twirling it around as if they are trying to find ‘north’ on a map? While IT folks like myself are usually used to not being able to see the sun the lack of right angles in the Venetian interior sometimes confuses us. 4. Are they wearing a Hawaiian shirt and shorts? IT folks live in climate controlled environments and this 100 degree weather, …

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