One of the most often questions/feedback we get regarding Windows 8.1 is where is my start menu. These conversations can get very passionate, and usually turn into a commentary around on how much we miss our start menu. I am sure some folks want to punch the screen. I totally understand your frustration and I went through this as well. While Windows 8 does provide a big change to how we do things in the interface, it did make me re-think why I used my start menu. What I learned from my own usage and talking to all you wonderful folks, is that the start menu is used for small common set of minimum tasks. Here is a list of the most common things folks like yourselves have told me, and I personally had problems finding in Windows 8.1: •Shutdown and Sign Out •Search •Launch and Find Recently Installed Applications Like all of you once I learned how to get around Windows 8 and find these basic tasks, I found that I will never need my start menu again. In this article, I am here to help show you how to accomplish these tasks with ease in Windows 8.1. In the end I hope you learn some new tips and tricks to improve how you use Windows 8.1,

There are people who take life slowly, accept it on its terms, meditate, read about meditation, and internalize books like "Wherever You Go, There You Are," a bestseller by a guy with a hyphenated name. I'm more of a Malcolm Gladwell fan -- Outliers or his newest book “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants." Maybe I'm just naturally the type that will spend 10,000 hours practicing, sharpening, mastering, thinking about the advantages a startup has over leaders in the market, getting back in the game. I've been in enterprise software for 30 years and the cloud since its formation. A long time ago, I faced the fact that I don't have the basketball gene (although I do coach several boys' sports teams) and I'm pretty sure meditating will not increase my productivity as a start-up CEO. I could be wrong on the meditating part.

IoT is not a new concept. Wikipedia says: “The term Internet of Things was proposed by Kevin Ashton in 1999 though the concept has been discussed in the literature since at least 1991.” In its early stages, the concept relates to the use of radio-frequency identification (RFID) and how “if all objects and people in daily life were equipped with identifiers, they could be managed and inventoried by computers.” Finally, Wikipedia adds that, “Equipping all objects in the world with minuscule identifying devices or machine-readable identifiers could transform daily life.” And this is exactly what is happening today and also what makes IoT more important than ever.

Gordon E. Moore's famously predicted tech explosion was prophetic, but it may have hit a snag. While the number of transistors on integrated circuits has doubled approximately every two years since his 1965 paper, the ability to process and transact on data hasn't. We're now ingesting data faster than we can make sense of it, leaving computing at an impasse. Without a new approach, the innovation promised by the combination of big data and internet scale may be like the flying cars we thought we'd see by 2014. Fortunately, this is is not the case, as in-memory computing offers a way to bridge this impasse.ning the doors to mass adoptiong of in-memory computing through open source.

Back in the noughties I made the conscious decision as a Storage guy to immerse myself into what was being termed server virtualization and understanding the product offerings of a relatively new company named VMware. To this day I remember the incredulous looks and responses I received from my Storage counterparts, who were convinced that the VMware fad was nothing more than a system admin tool. Indeed the organizations that were early adopters of VMware ended up assigning the virtualization responsibility to the system admins team; at no point was there ever a thought that a dedicated virtualization team could or should be established. Fast forward to 2014 and virtualization teams are the norm and Storage administrators are constantly being hard pressed to have a better understanding of VMware as they provision and manage virtualized environments. Such a culture change was unthinkable 10 years ago, yet here we are again with the emergence of another silo, the Converged Infrastructure team.

One of the questions I have been asked for a while is how do you set static IP address in Windows Azure Virtual Machines. Well you can! While it is like a DHCP reservation for the VM itself (the VM is still DHCP configured), it is treated as a static IP to Windows Azure. Now this does involve new Windows Azure PowerShell cmdlets. You will need to download and install the Windows Azure PowerShell cmdlets (possibly again) to get the new functionality.

I’ve been traveling the last few weeks shooting some videos for VMware PEX and RSA. When that happens, my browser tabs get crowded with the various stories I’m interested in but will read later. This time they all seemed to hover around Identity Theft. When I got home, in my awaiting physical mail was a letter from Target. I also returned something to a national hardware store and the cashier tried to crumple my credit-card-info-having receipt into a trash can. Kismet.

The Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) has begun offering an open process that will enable governments, agencies and businesses to create and manage a secure, hybrid IT computing environment quickly and cost effectively. Known as the NCOIC Rapid Response Capability (NRRC™), the process defines how to build a federated cloud infrastructure that provides a foundation for information sharing within a secure environment, enabling a diverse group of users to exchange data via their different technology applications so they can work on a common project or problem.

When considering the major benefits of modern cloud computing, the lower operational overhead of the cloud should be high on anyone’s list. But when it comes to sensitive data — such as healthcare, finance, retail or government data — security measures are needed to ensure privacy and abide by regulations. Such security measures may be prohibitive in terms of operational overhead. Companies are faced with finding the right balance between the lower operational overhead offered by the cloud and the higher operational overhead required by traditional cloud security.

In our last post "OpenNebula vs. OpenStack: User Needs vs. Vendor Driven" we stated that"OpenStack penetration in the market is relatively small compared with the investment made by vendors and VCs". We have received several emails from people asking for the numbers that support this statement. This conclusion arises from the comparison between OpenNebula and OpenStack user base, a well as between the resources invested in development and marketing by each of them.

If the future of federated controllers is based on service layering, then how do multiple controllers manage the same device? Is there a requirement for state synchronization? Do they share information about device operation or configuration? Is there a need for controllers that are managing different aspects of the same device to be coordinated in what they do? As with anything worth asking, the answer is: it depends. It is certainly the case that in a tiered controller architecture where one controller is managing things like basic configuration and another controller is working higher up the stack (managing a service, for instance), there is not a need to keep high fidelity replications of state across both controllers. Specific configuration information that might be important to the lower-level controller can likely be spared from the services controllers. In the cases that the services controller needs to know things like configuration state (it might be required to know VLAN provisioning, for instance), the services controller can likely query the device to get the state.

Looking back to one of my predictions for 2014, I had posited that traditional storage solutions labeled cloud will no longer fly this year, and some of the big-iron vendors will be forced to offer their wares as pay-as-you-go services. Perhaps this was stating an obvious eventuality as the market moves to a more cost-effective consumption model – but lo and behold, only two months into the year, it is already happening. You may have seen that a large vendor introduced a pay-as-you-go model for their on-premise storage. While geared toward managed service providers seeking to provide cloud storage to their customers, this new payment model is the first volley in what will likely be a pay-as-you-go tidal wave for hardware. Such models are certainly laudable efforts, bestowing customers the benefit of not having to purchase multiple years’ worth of capacity from day one at the current pricing.

It's that time of the year, when resolutions promising grand changes in our lives are made - and more often than we'd like to admit, broken. Along with the resolutions comes advice on how to make them "stick." In other words, how to make them habitual. Many folks still cite the old "21 days to form a habit" wisdom that has, in more recent research, been proven to be less than accurate. Turns out it takes longer than that for most people, with only a few actually able to form a habit that quickly. Unless it's something bad for us*. Then it seems to become a habit in under 2 days. Go figure.

If you thought that cyber security threats were troubling in 2013, then you should brace yourself for the onslaught that's very likely in 2014. A new generation of security threats stemming from progressive business technology trends -- such as BYOD, mobility and cloud services adoption -- will expose organizations to a multitude of new risks. According to the findings of a global security survey sponsored by Dell, the majority of IT leaders around the world say they don’t view these threats as top security concerns and they're not prioritizing how to find and address them across the many points of origin.

Today’s blog post is headed back to the basics. I’ve been using and talking about APM tools for so many years sometimes it’s hard to remember that feeling of not knowing the associated terms and concepts. So for anyone who is looking to learn about APM, this blog is for you.