Jim Liddle

With Virtualization becoming intertwined with cloud computing it is worth taking a step back and looking once again what virtualization is, and is not. Virtualization and Emulation are often compared, but there are a set of important differences. Emulation provides the functional... (more)

It’s often said that the Cloud will be a game changer and disruptive and that statement is put out there for the future but I believe we have already seen a huge example of this in the mobile telecommunications domain.  We have seen in the last twelve months the beginning of a fu... (more)

We’re hosting an event in the city of London on 11th November which is focused on practical implementations of public, private and hybrid clouds. We have speakers from British American Tobacco and Razorfish discussing implementations of private and hybrid clouds as well as Giga... (more)

It is great enthusing about the benefits of Cloud Computing, but what are the consequences when it goes wrong ? Of course, there are different levels of  ’going wrong’. We have often publicised outages from the likes of Amazon and Google, but given the publicised SLA’s of each so... (more)

I did a combined honours degree in Computer Science and History and have always retained an interest in history, particulalry British, American, and religious history which was what I studied.  After all, to try and understand the present, one has to fully understand the past.  I... (more)

The Dell Mini I use with OSX has the US keyboard layout, but a friend of mine layout and had a pr0blem that after his OSX instal, he could not get the backslash symbol to work using the key immediately to the right had side of the space bar. It comes up as ` instead. I eventuall... (more)

Cloud Computing Journal A complaint made by The Electronic Privacy Information Centre to the US Federal Trade Commission could lead to Google online services being closed down. They want Google shut off until Google adopts procedure and standards for safeguarding confidential i... (more)

What does it take to make a Cloud Computing infrastructure enterprise ready ? Well, as always, this probably depends on the use case, but support for real-time scaling and SLA support must figure highly. Software that purports to scale the applications on the cloud is not new, h... (more)

Some of the key things to think about when putting your application on the cloud are discussed below. Cloud computing is relatively new, and best practice is still being established. However we can learn from earlier technologies and concepts such as utility compute, SaaS, outsou... (more)

I tend to do quite a lot of presentations so was keen to get the Dell Mini with OSX ready for being able to plug into projectors and external monitors. Given the Dell’s unique display resolution this proved to be a bit of a problem, but the solution proved to be fairly simple. If... (more)

Amazon Cloud Journal on Ulitzer Following on from my last post, Securing Applications on the Amazon Elastic Cloud, One of the biggest questions I often see asked is “Is Amazon EC2 as a platform secure”? This is like saying is my vanilla network secure?  As you do to your interna... (more)

 Cloud Computing on Ulitzer In this post I will walk you through the  high level  of securing a normal tiered application running on EC2. First I will cover the basics of what EC2 provides and then briefly discuss how this can be used in a real life scenario. Security Groups ... (more)

Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) is a new type of storage designed specifically for Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS allows you to create volumes that can be mounted as devices by EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes behave as if they were raw unformatted external hard driv... (more)

At a recent Skills Matter event in the UK Goyko Adzic presented  for over an hour on Space Based programming in .Net. The slides are embedded below, but as this blog is syndicated and sometimes the slides get stripped out, you can find them here. Space Based Programming View mor... (more)

When deploying on EC2 even though Amazon provides the hardware infrastructure, you still need to tune your instances operating system and monitor your application. You should review your hardware/software requirements and review your application design and deployment strategy Th... (more)

Although version 7.0 of the Enterprise version of GigaSpaces XAP contains much more than just DataGrid or Caching, for many customer the need for reduced latency and increased performance as well as contention reduction is pressing and for these customers these needs are often a ... (more)

Jim Liddle is Managing Director of Jana Technology Services and UK Director of Sales and Operations for GigaSpaces. He is a regular blogger at SYS-CON.com, covering mobile, Grid, and Cloud Computing Topics. Well, people at the Cisco booth at a recent event seem to have the answer ... (more)

I love this image form Information Age, because it is so true. Recession was just what the IT needed to stimulate innovation and use of innovative products and technologies. See my two prior posts on this topic, “What to do during a recession ? Innovate !” and “Fear kills busines... (more)

There are two main issues I had with the 10.5.8 update: 1. The Battery showed that it was on Power even when it was not connected 2. Sleep stopped working I wasn’t to worried about the first issue, and did not want to waste time resolving it so I just installed slim battery (which... (more)

Sarkozy, the French leader, is all on his own it seems in wanting to restrict bankers bonuses, creating a campaign to ‘moralise capitalism’. He has forced French banks to agree to a code of conduct by threatening to pull French government business if they don’t agree. French bank... (more)