Links List 10.3.08

Posted October 3rd, 2008 by Joe Pendry

The U.S. banking bailout caused the U.S. House of Representatives web site to crash, produced by visitors bringing an enormous amount of traffic to the site. Jeff Ventura, spokesman for the House Chief Administrative Officer, said they “haven’t seen this much demand since the 9-11 commission report was posted on the site in 2004.” As a result, the U.S. House of Representatives is limiting the amount of emails its constituents can send to individual House members.

CMDBs are becoming a standard element in the IT infrastructure backbone, and the demand for return on investment with CMDBs is increasing. Enterprise Management Associates reports a dramatic jump in the number of companies that have completed their CMDB, from just 9% in 2006 to 33% in 2008. EMA recommends hitting the following three value propositions: cost avoidance, risk avoidance, and advancing IT maturity.

IT’s about uptime. Amit Agarwal at Digital Inspiration posted his top website monitoring services, with Royal Pingdom coming out on top. We interviewed Sam Nurmi at Royal Pingdom in August and think they are a great resource.

Microsoft revealed an updated platform plan to support composite applications in Windows server and the .Net Framework programming model. Microsoft recognizes the increase in web services and SOA usage. The platform strategy involves enhancements modified for the planned 4.0 version of .Net Framework, which is being featured in Windows Server 2008. One improvement is Dublin, a set of Window Server extensions that compliment .Net Framework and boosts the OS’s ability to act as an application server.

Microsoft developed a training program to teach thousands of interested IT professionals about virtualization. At VMWorld, Zane Adam, senior editor at Microsoft responsible for virtualization discussed the training program, which is part of Microsoft’s Dynamic IT strategy. Adam predicts IT departments will begin hiring datacenter staff who understand virtualization.