CEO's Connection
The Imaginary Standard
by Rob Gardos, CEO

When you sell data center management software, you learn a lot about the current state of the data center.  Between regime changes, acquisitions and shadow IT departments, the level of chaos in the data center is unfathomable.  What’s even more amazing is the complete denial by engineers of this reality.  It seems everyone talks about their regimented processes, guaranteeing up and down that they have standards, but yet can’t explain the simple issues that true consistency would rectify.  If you can’t figure out why an application works so well in UAT, but not in production, then you know what I’m talking about (“No, it’s supposed to be different.”). DBA denial on database inconsistencies is More >>

Featured Article
The Rocky Road to ITIL
by Matthew Zito, Chief Scientist

GridApp is in the middle of a very interesting segment of the enterprise software industry. With Bladelogic's IPO and Opsware's acquisition by HP, as well as smaller transactions like RealOps's acquisition by BMC, there's clearly a lot of interest in IT automation. However, it's still a developing and emerging industry, and consequently there's a lot of "buzzword fever", where they latch on to terms or concepts to try to help prove More >>

Ask the Expert - Mr. Database
Standardize, Standardize, Standardize
by Eric Gross, DBA

Every enterprise worth its salt employs standards on all aspects of their infrastructure. Without a large degree of similarity between each implementation, it would take far more database operators to manage a fixed number of database servers. As you move your purview from the architect's office to the data center you will likely notice More>>