First of all, here’s a scan of the programme to help me remember what I went to:




The most thought-provoking session being Brian’s Myths and Realities (consumerisation of IT) which led on from his and Harry Labana’s talk the day before and the morning roundtable. I realised that a lot of the problems could be solved by my USB idea (see below).
I am currently working on a cloud project for a client. For me, the goal of cloud computing is to make IT another utility. You go to the office, fill the kettle from the tap, plug the kettle into the power socket and plug your USB sticks into the hypervisor which the IT department supplies along with a nice big screen and keyboard.
What you have on your USB sticks is virtual machine which contains your desktop: O/S, apps and even data (maybe another USB stick for that). The hypervisor loads and runs your VM, which is in a standard format and you log in to your familiar desktop and share your data using an internet connection, gmail and dropbox. Don’t forget, I’m assuming that in a few years time a pendrive will contain terabytes, but even today you could carry a pretty massive hard drive easily.
I already have an old Toshiba laptop running XP which had 128M and I P2V’d when I bought a new machine (which is also old now). I’m going to export that to a USB stick and do an experiment soonish to see how portable it is (using VMware products for starters).
Finally thanks to Jim Moyle (who gave a fascinating, nay shocking talk on Windows IOPs) and for inviting me to “Ye Olde Cheddar Cheese” in Fleet Street along with some of the other presenters and Techtarget folks where we ended up in the basement (surprise surprise) and from where I parted company very late as they headed off to another venue.
I trust everyone made their flights and I look forward to another meet-up.