What Is Your Reason for Virtualization and Cloud, Anyway?

Gear shifting in a modern car is a highly virtualized application nowadays. Whether you’re driving a stick or an automatic, it is certainly not the same as your great grandaddy’s shifting (assuming he owned a car). The huge difference between a stick and an automatic is how much work the operator has to perform to get the job done. In the case of an automatic, the driver sets the car up correctly (putting it into drive as opposed to one of the other gears), and then forgets about it other than depressing and releasing the gas and brake pedals....

Databases in the Cloud Revisited

A few of us were talking on Facebook about high speed rail (HSR) and where/when it makes sense the other day, and I finally said that it almost never does. Trains lost out to automobiles precisely because they are rigid and inflexible, while population densities and travel requirements are highly flexible. That hasn’t changed since the early 1900s, and isn’t likely to in the future, so we should be looking at different technologies to answer the problems that HSR tries to address. And since everything in my universe is inspiration for either blogging or gaming, this lead me to...

Force Multipliers and Strategic Points of Control Revisited

On occasion I have talked about military force multipliers. These are things like terrain and minefields that can make your force able to do their job much more effectively if utilized correctly. In fact, a study of military history is every bit as much a study of battlefields as it is a study of armies. He who chooses the best terrain generally wins, and he who utilizes tools like minefields effectively often does too. Rommel in the desert often used Wadis to hide his dreaded 88mm guns – that at the time could rip through any tank the British...

The Golden Age of Data Mobility?

I was working for a mid-sized enterprise as an IT manager, a project that was on the cutting edge of technology at the time, and because it was on the cutting edge, we were using a whole slew of different embedded applications and their masters to collect data. Those masters were written on every platform imaginable – from Novell Netware to Windows to Linux to Solaris – and in every language that was common on each of the platforms. Our job was to make sense of it all. The information these systems collected was billing data, they all collected...

Load Balancing For Developers: Improving Application Performance With ADCs

If you’ve never heard of my Load Balancing For Developers series, it’s a good idea to start here. There are quite a few installments behind us, and I’m not going to look back in this post any more than I must to make it readable without going back… Meaning there’s much more detail back there than I’ll relate here. Again after a lengthy sojourn covering other points of interest, I return to Load Balancing For Developers with a more holistic view – application performance. Lori has talked a bit about this topic, and I’ve talked about it in the...

Holiday Gifts: An ARX For Me, An Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control Plug-in for You!

Well, this is my “on vacation” blog, so I’ll keep it short. This holiday season I received a big box from our Data Solutions Group that I’m told contains an ARX for my play-time and will no doubt fill your reading time in the new year. Assuming you read my blog anyway ;-). Those guys rock, and pulled through for me in a  major way to get this delivered. I’m stoked to have one to play with, and will blog for you from set-up to messing with it. I’m terrible about that. Give me new hardware and I play with it...

Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control Plug-in for BIG-IP LTM Beta

If you’re an OEM user and an F5 customer, we’ve got an updated version of the OEM Grid Control Plug-in for BIG-IP in beta testing right now. It’s been in limited beta for a while, but we wanted to make certain that both TMOS 9.x and 10.x were supported before we talked about it publicly. The plug-in, jointly developed by F5 and Oracle, allows you to monitor your BIG-IP like any other infrastructure in the Oracle Enterprise Manager, and if you’re part of the beta program, you can download the source to see how the developers did it too!...

Oracle Fusion Middleware Deployment Guides

Well hello again! After a week off with H1N1 (don’t get it, you really won’t like it), and another week or two catching up, I’m finally back in the saddle and there’s plenty to talk about – some of it stuff I should have been talking about weeks ago. Today we’ll discuss the Deployment Guides some smart folks here at F5 have thrown together to go with the Oracle Fusion Middleware Enterprise Deployment guides (that some smart folks at Oracle threw together). First up, props to Oracle for an astounding document library that you can access...

OOW Coverage on DevCentral

Okay, I know I haven’t been posting as much as normal for quite a while now… Trust me, I still have plenty to say, my mind has just been wrapped up in special projects and editorial calendars. Meanwhile, Pete Silva, one of our Technical Marketing Managers, has been out at Oracle Open World and has been getting tons of great video for us. Since they’re coming fast and furious, this post is just to make certain you saw them. He gets some great insight into both F5 and Oracle products, and knows how to keep it short-and-sweet, so...

Oracle Open World is Upon Us!

This weekend tons of people will be headed to San Francisco to attend Oracle Open World, and as usual, F5 will be there. We’ve been burning the midnight oil with Oracle on quite a few projects, and over the next few weeks – perhaps even months, since our partnership goes back to 2001 and we here at DevCentral haven’t been keeping you up to date on all the new developments - we’ll be giving you hints tips and tricks to get the most from your Oracle and F5 investments. This sounds like we’re going to...