The-Asterisk

First let me clarify. I own a technology company that provides IT support services to a lot of small and medium sized businesses. As you well know, supporting anything that has to do with computers is a huge undertaking and what you need to know to make it through one day is completely different than what you needed to know the day before. Several months back, we took on the support of a decent-sized company. Their data center was, shall we say, a mess. Well, I looked at their existing servers and decided that we could re-use two of them. They were built from Intel parts, with a 2U rack mount case, 4 active removable drive bays and an Intel S5000VSA motherboard. This motherboard supports RAID but the existing RAID drives were degraded (NICE!!!) We finally got the opportunity to pull one of the servers out for refurbishment. I brought it back to the shop and ran Sysinternal's DISK2VHD on the server. Next, I removed the old drives, well... removed the old drive and set it aside as ...

VDI, for those of you who don't know, is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Generally speaking, VDI is the technology where you set up multiple virtual PCs on a host computer. What you end up with is a server running VMWare, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xen, or some other hypervisor with a number of PC images running on top of the hypervisor. Each image is then controlled by a client device, be it a thin client, re-purposed PC running special software, or some other equipment. Contrast this with Terminal Services (now called Remote Desktop Services) which is where a server multitasks and allows multiple users to share the same server simultaneously. VDI hosts multiple instances (Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Linux, Windows 98) running at the same time whereas RDS allows Windows Server 2008R2 to be run by 20-30 or more users at the same time. Now that we have all of that established, there are a bunch of cool technologies out, or coming out that support VDI in a variety of ways. T...

While I am getting used to using my new 3G iPad, I am thinking ahead to what might be next... actually, what I want to be next. I was struck by three events that happened this week. HP purchased Palm for a cool $1.2 Billion, Microsoft dropped its Courier (two screen foldable) tablet project and HP has also dropped its plans for a slate device based on Windows 7. Things are definitely happening in the mobile computing space, and happening quickly. As I have tweeted and talked about before and Dave Sobel has actually demonstrated , the iPad can be used as a kind of portable thin client. I don't yet know how well it works, but any kind of application like this is a good thing for business computing. We keep hearing over and over about cloud this and cloud that. We also hear about how Apple is the devil incarnate to application developers who are stymied by Apple's restrictions on what can be developed for the iPad and iPhone. And do not forget Steve Jobs' obsession with keep...