Yet Another (ex-)VC Blog

Some former coworkers of mine recently published a new book loaded with best practices for deploying VMware virtualization technology.  The book is called (you guessed it) ‘Deploying the VMware Infrastructure‘.

I contributed some content that made it into the book and am happy to see that it’s going to be available for the first time at VMworld!

I should probably also mention that I don’t receive any compensation for sales of the book, just in case anyone wants to beat me up on conflict-of-interest :)

Since the birth of my twin daughters, I have been documenting every squirm, pee, poop, and cry via a Tumblr blog.  I figured that this would be easier than emailing 20 relatives and friends every time something happened in my kids’ lives.

Not surprisingly, my family visits the site frequently to check for updates.  However, they are also interacting with the site through the comment system (Disqus) that I configured versus emailing back and forth.  This is interesting because my family (maybe with the exception of a couple of folks) are your ‘average’ US internet user.  They aren’t reading blogs and they’re just using the Internet for web, email, and maybe some IM or casual games.  The fact that my Dad now has a Disqus account and is commenting like a madman is pretty cool to see :)

Now, if my baby girls can get my Dad to sign up for Disqus, what’s the implication?  I think that the average internet user who would not normally think to use niche social networking technologies (i.e. social bookmarking, digg, etc) might use it to enrich their experience and engage with content that they find incredibly compelling.  Grandparents (content consumer) and grandkids (content producers) are the example we’re discussing here, but you could extend this theory to other pairings as well.  I need to think about this some more but might these types of hyper-relevant pairings of content consumer and producer be a way for new social web services to get traction (versus targeting early adopter digerati, as is done today)?

Now I gotta go and get the whole family to subscribe to the baby blog RSS feed… ;)

Best. Ad. Ever. For virtualization software.  From the guys at Bluebear.

Click here to view (embedding isn’t working for some reason).

I had a conversation with a web entrepreneur the other day and came upon the topic of web service APIs.  Offhandedly, I asked him “When are you guys going to write an API?” assuming that the answer would be “Soon” or “We’re working on it”  After all, it seems like every web service from Friendfeed to Facebook have one…and even much smaller services with very little traction.

His answer, which surprised me, was that they were not going to write one (even though their main competitor had already done so).

His theory was that there was pretty much no point in writing an API unless you were a service the scale of Facebook, MySpace, etc.  After this discussion, I thought more about it and I’m starting to think that there might be something to his argument.

After all, why expend effort on developing a great API when you’re still trying to build a solid userbase?

Shouldn’t user experience and user acquisition be the core focus of your business at the early stage of any web company? Is an API actually contributing to that goal?

When is the userbase of a sufficient size where an API will be a big value-add for both users and the web sites that use the API?

Or is there another set of parameters that one should look at besides userbase size when making this kind of decision?

Last night I attended the NY IT Tech Meetup for the first time.  The group is meant to connect Israeli entrepreneurs based in NYC with the resources they need to help make their companies successful.  The event was very well attended and I enjoyed it quite a bit.  There were a couple of startups that demo’d including Brixity and DiningFever.com.  It seemed like there was some good investor representation as well, with Danny Schultz from DFJ Gotham and some guys from Tavel (sp?) as well (Israeli angel network) in attendance.  After the meeting I chatted with a bunch of entrepreneurs and students.

The big announcement that came out of the meeting was that NY IT Tech Meetup was going global and reforming as a new organization called TechAviv.  TechAviv will create a structured way for Israeli startups to obtain assistance from other folks in the network and also help them get access to investors.  Even better, they are going to be raising a seed fund to invest in Israeli (globally) startups.  Judging from the number of people at the meetup who asked me if our firm does seed rounds, I would say that there will be quite a bit of deal flow for the TechAviv folks!

Congrats to Yaron and gang for organizing a great meetup and supporting entrepreneurs in NY and abroad!

Assume your IT department runs all operating systems within virtual machines, and you have a fixed budget of $X to spend on a single new management software package.  Your boss tells you that you must purchase one of these packages (it’s year end and you will lose the budget if you don’t use it).

Your choices…

Package #1: This software allows you to manage operating system level and application level configurations in an elegant fashion.  You can assign roles to different servers and ensure that their configuration is always consistent with what you’ve specified in the management system.  Assume this tool has minimal awareness of what’s happening in the hypervisor.  It’s really focused on the guest operating systems.

Package #2: This software allows you to manage virtual machines in an elegant fashion.  Virtual machines can easily be created, tracked, deleted, and copied.  The software also allows you to develop and execute virtual machine workflow that make disaster recovery, test and development, etc much easier.  Basically, you are able to manage the full lifecycle of a virtual machine as well as automate tasks involving one or more virtual machines.  Assume this tool has minimal awareness of the guest operating systems.

Both packages cost $X, so you can only purchase one system.  Assume otherwise that these systems are equivalent in terms of reliability, ability to be customized, etc.

Which would package would you choose as either a) the CIO or b) the guy who is doing the hands-on administration work?

Feel free to state if you’re answering for a small, medium, or large IT shop as well.

Looking forward to seeing the responses…

The fine folks at Amazon recently posted to their Web Services blog about the idea of ‘cloudbursting’.  I thought it was an interesting post and touches on one use case for Amazon Web Services – as an overflow system to scale up your processing power on demand, even though you typically run your own datacenter or host servers in a colocation facility.

The post also discusses the concept of a hybrid model of computing, where some computing is done in-house, and some in the cloud.  As they said in the post, when they talk to folks about the idea of cloud computing, people tend to settle for a ‘middle of the road’ solution:

A typical audience contains a nice mix of wild-eyed enthusiasts and more conservative skeptics. The enthusiasts are ready to jump in to cloud computing with both feet, and start to make plans to move corporate assets and processes to the cloud as soon as possible. The conservative folks can appreciate the benefits of cloud computing, but would prefer to take a more careful and measured approach. When the enthusiasts and the skeptics are part of the same organization, they argue back and forth and often come up with an interesting hybrid approach.

The details vary, but a pattern is starting to emerge. The conservative side advocates keeping core business processes inside of the firewall. The enthusiasts want to run on the cloud. They argue back and forth for a while, and eventually settle on a really nice hybrid solution. In a nutshell, they plan to run the steady state business processing on existing systems, and then use the cloud for periodic or overflow processing.

I would propose there is another powerful use case for the hybrid model – the outsourcing of specific IT processes into the cloud.

This has been done in the business software world through SaaS, and now because of cloud computing solutions, it can be done in the world of IT infrastructure.   For example, there are some companies that are starting to do interesting stuff in this hybrid model beyond simply providing overflow computational capacity.

• Simply Continuous is addressing the painful problem of business continuity by allowing customers to replicate their Wintel-based datacenters into their fully managed cloud.
• Similarly, Skytap allows customers to create virtual software testing environments and pay by the drink instead of buying hardware and software to support those testing efforts.
• 3tera recently announced a partnership with Nirvanix where Nirvanix’s storage cloud would be integrated with 3tera’s cloud computing management software.

Would love to hear about other examples that are out there.

Just opened up my FriendFeed to the public.  Feel free to subscribe and become privy to all of my Internet meanderings. :)