The move to virturalization leaves stone is being left unturned. It touched the public network via EC2 (and now a host of hosts) it formed the Cloud and fused a new generation of the Internet. Service orientated also hits the data centers and this means things like switches, servers, and disk.

At the core of the movement of virtualization movement is freedom of the physical environment. Optimize hardware performance and set the workload free. In the process of doing this, a promise of cost savings has set a off a storm in re-factoring the data center.

This is the first in a series of posts taking a look at areas of the data center and how an openness strategy become a driver for winning customers by bringing costs down.

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We took a look at the storage landscape from the eyes of Hitachi Data Systems, “HDS”.

We spoke with Hu Yoshida, CTO of HDS. He gave us a practical overview on how the needle of enterprise costs are being reduced focusing on reducing operational costs.

One thing the he mentioned was that Hitachi’s HDS division was able to grow in the storage business in this tough climate, which is amazing considering it is an industry that follows economic spending as a whole.

Yoshida attributes part of this to HDS decision to deliberately disrupt their own “closed” box solution where storage and management are sold together. This allows IT shops to have more choice, and decouple vendors. He said that this was a big decision for the company, as it opened up more competition to a core business.

Protocol vs. API

Yoshida said that the team at HDS decided it was inevitable for this protocol level standardization to exist. His team felt that HDS needed to be a leader in this opportunity. He cited a customer that uses an HDS head as a management function that had NetApp behind it as a pattern they supported that several years ago would have been done by partnership rather than protocol level support.

Although in this scenario HDS didn’t win “all tiers” of this storage solution, it was able to be a fabric and join a customer that “loves NetApp” and loves HDS too.

Mr. Yoshida said that his company decided to fully embrace the protocol level integration with the surrounding systems, instead of only releasing only APIs, as a means to allow more competition – and cooperation in the ecosystem through technology rather than selective partnerships.

Considering the Tiers

An area of storage that is ripe for cost savings is supporting different types of solutions, e.g. production vs. development and classes of storage based on the application.

In his blog post, New Considerations for Tiered Storage, Hu examines reduction of costs.

Looking under the covers we see that there is a lot of questions to ask in the details of these strategies, and marketing matters in how solutions are perceived and how different types of hardware (for example Seagate vs. HDS) make a difference for buyers, and that to be a leader, it is key to have answers across the industry ecosystem.

When we look at the decision being on moving the cost needle down for operations management instead of hardware savings, it becomes clear that playing nicely pays. HDS is a company that plays on both sides of the storage spectrum (management layer and disk) and it’s partnerships include relationships with HP (as OEM) and companies like Cisco and Brocade as go-to-market partners. It is tempting to “hardwire” solutions together, but it is a bigger win when instead these are loosely coupled and partner-ready.

Looking at it from the angle of cost reduction for open standards gives the pivot point to consider this natural tension offered by virtualization has a promise binding vendors together to optimize their solutions for the plug-and-play data center.

Does an open protocol powered data center reduce total costs? IBM, HP, Cisco, NetApp, Oracle…Hitachi thinks so, do you?

Discuss

Google has announced that it is working on an operating system based on Google Chrome (their browser). The company says the project is an attempt to "re-think what operating systems should be."

The OS-in-progress is simply called Google Chrome OS,  it is open source, and it will initially be aimed at netbooks. The announcement came on the same day that Google dropped the "beta" tag from Google Apps.

"Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve," VP Product Management Sundar Pichai and Engineering Director Linus Upson say in a joint blog post.

Google says the key aspects of Chrome OS are:

- Speed
- Simplicity
- Security

"We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds," Pichai and Upson explain. "The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work."

The company has been making quite a big deal about speed lately, particularly on the web. Google recently launched a "let’s make the web faster" campaign, calling on webmasters all over the web to help make their sites faster.

The Google Chrome OS code will be open sourced later this year, and Netbooks that have Chrome OS running on them will be available in the second half of 2010.

It’s interesting to see Google finally go right at Microsoft’s core business now that Microsoft has become so aggressive going at Google’s. It looks like we may have some interesting times ahead.

Just because Chrome OS is starting on Netbooks, don’t think it will end there. Google has already said that it was designed to power computers from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.

If Google makes good on its promise of allowing users to get right to the web in seconds, the OS will likely be appealing to a lot of consumers who are used to Windows. The Google brand, which is already so powerful among consumers may be more appealing than other alternative operating systems (like Linux) to the average non-techie consumer.

As I said, interesting times are ahead. What are your thoughts on a Google OS for the PC? Discuss.

The rage to milk money from Adsense continues into 2009. While there are many different ways to do this, it’s no secret Google is keeping a watchful eye on spam sites which automatically generate pages consistently on a daily basis.

Every now and then, Adsense ‘experts’ would introduce a ‘fresh’ new way of generating pages which Google “has not caught on yet”, be it article, directory or backlink generators.

While these software are very good at what they do, you can’t solely depend on them for long-term success. It’s a natural tendency that automatically generated content just doesn’t look like quality pages with highly informative, up-to-date content, but it’s my personal observation.

Most run-of-the-mill, ads-on-topfold Adsense sites lack substantial sections and deeper structures to be interesting enough to make visitors think they should come back to check them out more often. While generating as many pages as possible is crucial to get them indexed and thereby build substantial presence in search results, these types of pages should only complement principal content that reflects what your site stands for and the selling point it serves to maximize its overall value. There used to be a question that goes, “Is building Adsense sites a business?” My answer is: Adsense is secondary.

Of course, like you I do want Adsense to be my primary source of income. The secret is in emphasizing content and value, not Adsense ads. You may have felt resigned to say, “Does that mean more work?” Not really. Here’s another secret inspired by a quote from Albert Einstein: You can’t solve your Adsense income challenge at the same level of thinking.

Truth is: I have build a good number of Adsense sites, but my main Internet Marketing site which I treat as my core business earns more than some of them despite my intention not to make it Adsense-focused, all the more so when it has absolutely nothing to do with high-paying keywords and the tremendous amount of time that goes into keyword research…which leads to the next secret: create a site with a subject or niche you know you can continually express and expand on instead of getting stuck with a ‘lucrative’ keyword you may run out of ideas on in the long term.

This is as good as saying Adsense is not just a keyword value game; it is still the classic “How do I get and retain traffic” game, and traffic is not some scoreline, but real people with genuine interest.

eHow.com is an incredible example. It’s a free site that shows people how to do a lot of different things. The best way to explain the site is just for you to go have a quick look now. They have hundreds, possibly thousands of pages of content on all sorts of subjects and the way they get traffic to their site is through the search engines.

Every page on the site has an Adsense box on it and that’s how it makes money. They also have a Alexa traffic ranking of around 2000 which is great.

Of course, it doesn’t make sense to write or purchase that much content by yourself. eHow.com succeeds in getting its visitors involved in content contribution. There’s also a wikiHow to get contributors involved in constant update of a common topic or article.

For a start, here are suggestions on the type of sections you can integrate into a site:

1. Lead capture page with freebies or incentives
2. Article directory
3. A ‘Contact Us’ page
4. An ‘About Us’ page
5. Forum: The challenge lies in the time and effort needed to build up momentum to encourage forum participants to write in
6. An archive section of some kind, for selected articles for example
7. Blog/podcast pages
8. Reciprocal link directory
9. Sitemap

It doesn’t take much to think of these standard sections. Even a products section makes your site look good besides providing another source of income, and then you replicate these sections site after site, niche after niche.

4th secret: Only sites with a general theme can afford to be massive-looking. Examples: Entrepreneur.com and Dogomania.com. Then you break the theme down into specifics like gathering them under an umbrella: dog training, dog hygiene, dog naming, dog psychology, doggy habits etc. Accurate targeting of Adsense ads depends on specific subjects as reflected on page. One thing to note is it is better that specific sections are inter-linked in some ways. If you run a site on everything about cancer, because “colon cancer” and “breast cancer” are not intrinsically related, visitors interested in one section may not want to take a first glance at another.

5th secret about content: write from a ‘consumer’ perspective instead of the ‘opportunist’ or “how to make money” perspective. What is it your visitors are looking to buy? Ads normally target and appeal directly to consumers. It’s pointless to put up content about how to make money with car accessories when there are hardly ads on “how to make money”. Stick to introducing car accessories and let the ads do the selling. If an accessory or equipment catch visitors’ attention and they click on the ads, you got Adsense dollars.

That’s about all the ideas I have at this moment. You should be confident now and maybe have some more new ideas I haven’t thought of. For sure, Adsense is a major income source you should seriously explore and make it big if you haven’t done so. This is one of those money machines that will make you money-on-demand pretty much for the life of Google.

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

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5 Money-On-Demand Secrets To Creating Great Adsense Sites