Have you ever had a computer for a long time and then wanted or needed to move all your data to a new one? Or, have you ever had to reinstall Windows just because you’ve loaded so many programs that it’s caused your computer to crash so often that you’re willing to start over? Well, what would you say if I told you it is possible to take a “snapshot” of your entire computer and move or copy the data to another machine in minutes so you can continue right where you left off.

Well you can, and it’s not something that is “coming soon”, it’s here today and has been here for at least a couple of years. The technology is called Virtualization, and there are several software vendors who provide the capability to allow you to do this on any operating system – Mac, Linux, or PC.

Before you ask me “why would I want to virtualize my computer”, let me share a few reasons:

• Portable workspaces – virtualization allows you to move your entire digital workspace from one physical machine to another. You can even use an iPod or USB memory sticks to host a virtual machine!
• Testing and training – rather than loading all kinds of unknown software into your normal computing environment, you can have a virtual machine just for testing. Heck, you could have one for games, one for personal computing, and one for work!
• Disaster recovery – if you always keep a recent backup of your virtual machine, say… on a portable USB hard drive, even if your computer dies you’ll be able to pick back up exactly where you left off without having to reinstall everything.
• Consolidation – Virtual machines are used to consolidate many physical servers into fewer servers, which in turn host virtual machines. Each physical server is reflected as a virtual machine “guest” residing on a virtual machine host system. This is also known as Physical-to-Virtual or ‘P2V’ transformation.

Read the rest of this entry »

At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, I took some time out to speak with Michael Scherotter about the Layered Technologies grid computing technology.

Grid computing is a system whereby many computers are assembled together to create one large computing system with vast amounts of processor power, RAM, and storage.

For those of you who might recall, this is the exact platform we’ve chosen to deploy Woopra on, and if you watch the video now you’ll know why!
Read the rest of this entry »

Breaking news folks. This story has been reported by Forbes, MorningStar, Yahoo Finance, BusinessWire, Security Sales & Integration, and God knows who else. The amazing thing is… the news was only released less than two hours ago.

By the way, Elie, Jad and I are extremely grateful to Layered Technologies and 3Tera for their very quick reaction to our need to scale Woopra, and appreciative of the pledge of this absolutely massive quantity of Grid computing power. Thank you very much team!

April 02, 2008 04:31 PM Eastern Daylight Time

Layered Technologies and 3Tera to Provide 100 Grid-Servers to Woopra

Rapid Growth of Real-Time Web Analytics Service Powered by Cloud Computing Platform

PLANO, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Layered Technologies, Inc., a leading worldwide provider of “on demand” IT infrastructure, and 3Tera, Inc., the leading innovator of grid computing technology and utility computing services for Web applications, today announce support for Woopra, the real-time Web analytics platform. The companies will provide 100 grid-based servers in order to assist Woopra as it experiences a huge market demand prior to official launch.

Read the rest of this entry »