Interop 2008: Wednesday keynotes liveblog

Part 1: IBM and Web 2.0 / collaborative technologies. Presenter was using Lotus Symphony to present his slides; claims it’s free to download and at least looks to be on par with Powerpoint.

Current iteration of Notes is slick and is incorporating the technologies that we are trying to smash together–directory services, blogs, wikis, social networking (Face/Space, Twitter), IM, the whole works. Still looks a bit like a clunky IBM product.

Look for a beta of their new Web 2.0 product, Bluehouse. Demo wasn’t clear whether this was the name of the suite or a component.

Part 2: Cisco and virtualization. Why virtualize? (We’re talking about virtual presence, and virtual servers/VM.) Costs, large campuses, multiple locations, globalization.

Speaker is promoting virtualization as a way to multitask more efficiently (argh!). Need to upgrade human brain first.

Now getting into a real issue about virtualization: IT silos and individual resource pools make it tough to get buy-in. Q: Would PSU be able to bring computing resources together out of the individual departments/silos? PSU Cloud in the future?

In many virtual server setups the weakest link is the hypervisor. Admins leave big security holes here. Beware!

Virtualization shifts mindset from server-centric to services-centric. A good shift.