Institutional shareholders, frequently under pressure to perform from their clients and to maintain their own performance rankings, seek short-term performance from their investments, not always to the longer term strategic advantage.
They point out that outsourcing services providers are often required to make sizeable upfront investments in IT equipment and personnel. IBM reported that payment from Zurich Financial will be made using a "pay per use" system for desktops...
CIOs should consider using sophisticated portfolio management software with embedded processes to facilitate decision-making, provide empirical data and automate the timely tracking of investments. The benefits of this structured discipline include...
Multiple physical systems may be combined into a pool of virtual resources, allowing virtual machines to be moved from one physical resource to another, enabling greater flexibility of systems. Using version 4, XenSource says it is now possible for...
She pointed in particular to the Open Virtualization Machine Format (OVF) effort, in which VMware, Microsoft and XenSource created a common format for storing virtual machines onto hard drives. That software lets administrators handle tasks such as...
That separation lets many operating systems be shoehorned onto a single server for greater efficiency, and increasingly it also permits higher-level tasks, such as shifting virtual machines off overtaxed physical machines.