The resilience of the U.S. economy in the face of recent recession worries is a wonderful thing to behold. If you're like me, you've resigned yourself to a kind of schizoid view of the current business cycle. Greatly simplified, it boils down to: average people, very worried; businesses, not so much. Or, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt put it in a recent interview: "What recession?"

It should be clear to most of us by now that server virtualization changes the Disaster Recovery (DR) game dramatically. Rather than having to maintain a server at your DR site for each server in your production environment you can replicate physical, and/or virtual, servers from your production site to virtual servers at your DR site reducing the cost of protecting production systems or increasing the number of servers you can protect. The fly in the ointment has been that the virtual server environment at your DR site would have to handle your production loads in the event of a disaster so you couldn't stack too many virtual servers on a single host. Sungard's new business continuity services for VMware addresses this problem by using different virtual server hosts during normal operations and during a disaster.

Astute readers may have noticed many of my recent blog posts have touched on VM management. I've been doing research for InformationWeek Reports, investigating the state of vendor offerings, real-world experiences and new solutions to handle VM sprawl.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently said, "We have been talking to Yahoo and we are very excited to be working with them." The goal? Tie the two companies into an advertising powerhouse, which I have decided to call GooHoo.

Who says the profit motive and Third World development can't work together? Wireless infrastructure giant Ericsson is trying to prove otherwise in remote areas of Sub-Saharan Africa.

A flu virus was picked up by at least a few attendees to the JavaOne Conference at the Moscone Center, the San Francisco Health Department has warned. It didn't say how many of the 15,000 attendees were affected, but as I read this in the San Francisco Chronicle, I'm feeling poorly [look at his pallor] myself.

Self-replicating programs, which spread unchecked across the Internet, are always bad. Except when they're good. At least that's the theory behind U.S Patent number 7,296,923, awarded to Symantec for "Using a benevolent worm to assess and correct computer security vulnerabilities."

Another legal challenge to the GPL has ended, at least for the time being.  This time it's courtesy of Skype, in German court, with the kind of legal maneuvers that make you wonder what they were thinking -- although they do conveniently illustrate the nature of some of the knee-jerk arguments against the GPL (and FOSS, too).

After finding a few last-minute problems with Vista Service Pack 1 and XP Service Pack 3, Microsoft delayed deployment on both of them. Now they're both back and ready for download, either manually or through Windows Update.

This is bordering on ridiculous. Last week, iPhone users (myself included) noticed that they could get free access to Wi-Fi service from AT&T at Starbucks locations. Later in the week, AT&T yanked the service. Early this week, it put the service back up, complete with information on the AT&T Web site. Today, any references to free Wi-Fi for iPhones is once again gone. What gives, AT&T?

The Jet Propulsion Lab will begin pilot testing startup Socialcast's social networking software for potential use by NASA. The space agency is interested in using Socialcast for knowledge transfer as Apollo-era employees retire.

I pay $60 per month for my wireless broadband card with Verizon Wireless. Sprint and AT&T charge similar rates. Are the carriers keeping prices high to deter people from signing up, or is $60 for 5 GB of wireless data the fair market price?

In a previous entry I wrote about the importance of moving data from primary storage to another platform. The roadblock is how to move that data from expensive storage to secondary storage. The traditional approach of deploying an agent on every server that monitors all the files and then moves files that haven't been accessed to a lower class of storage hasn't worked well in the enterprise. There are a variety of reasons, but most of the issues are the deployment and management of that many agents, plus the challenge of leaving stub files (files that point to where the actual file was moved) and managing those files.

Recently I've been pretty hard on content management vendors by pointing out some of the mistakes that can drive them out of business. While vendor elitism with customers can be a big problem, I can't let content management clients completely off the hook. There are a few mistakes that I've seen over and over in every vertical.

I am not a fan of hockey. I make no apologies for that, but I do love seeing hockey live. No other sport beats it. So when I sat down with Josh Schachter, the founder of startup HockeyBarn.com, I expected to have to make myself concentrate really hard to appear interested as he rattled off things like shots on goal and the mystical notion of icing. Instead, this passionate young entrepreneur wowed me with a very cool social media idea.

The web site CrackBerry, which bought the BlackBerry 9000 for over $800 on eBay, has filmed its own video review of the next-generation hardware from RIM. In this video, CrackBerry performs a walk through of the revamped user interface. Looks fantastic.

It's been reported that the Firefox Web browser has been distributing a Trojan horse application with the Vietnamese language pack. No one is sure how many users may have unwittingly downloaded the malware.

A few years ago it was easy to divide IT organizations into haves and have nots. The haves used Fibre Channel SANs and array replication to dedicated disaster recovery sites over high bandwidth dedicated links or dark fiber. The have-nots used SCSI DAS (Direct Attached Storage) on their servers and, if they did real time replication at all, used server-based replication solutions like Double-Take or CA's WANsync.

In case you hadn't heard, mobile employees are a threat to your business. A lost smartphone, or a laptop that connects to a rogue network rather than a legitimate one, can open your company to all sorts of risks. To help match some of the threats and one-up VPNs, Google used its Postini acquisition to create Web Security for Enterprise.

Google may be denying that there's a brain drain going on, as the BBC reports, but that doesn't mean it's not happening.

Good news: Asus is about to unveil its next generation of Eee PC mininotebooks in both Windows XP and Linux editions, and they look downright snazzy.  Bad news for folks down under: The Linux version of the new Eee is more expensive in Australia.  What!?

What do future generations think about the state of Java and its relevance to their research? The answer may surprise you, and Sun.

Or Microsoft or Cisco or VMware or...? A Swiss technologist's book says a culture that values risk-taking is Europe's missing ingredient.

U.K. network operator O2 has sold out of its supply of 8-GB and 16-GB iPhones. It has no plans to restock either model, suggesting that the 3G iPhone will soon be available. Also, purported spy shots of the 3G iPhone have emerged from Taiwan, where it is being manufactured. There are some subtle changes compared with the current model.

Three years after signing its first electronic "John Hancock," DocuSign has now inked more than 9 million digital signatures. As companies look for ways to introduce eco-friendly business processes, more are signing, virtually, on the dotted line.

Viral marketing is moving into areas you'd never have thought. Take software-as-a-service, where upstart Workday, a company formed in 2005 by PeopleSoft founder and ex-CEO Dave Duffield, is posting up on YouTube a series of short videos -- OK, they're commercials -- which poke virtual fingers in the eyes of industry powerhouse SAP.

Will NFS become the predominant storage deployment method for VMware implementations?

NFS didn't need to be saved, but because of VMware its use has been broadened beyond the traditional Unix implementations. Instead of creating a LUN for each VMware Virtual Disk (VMDK), with NFS you manage multiple VMDK files on a single NFS Volume. This makes sense because VMDK's are files, not actual disks.

Want to try out desktop virtualization? Take a look at Sun's latest open source VirtualBox -- I bet it has a binary with your name on it.

Microsoft must be having a problem manufacturing Zunes, and needs to slow down sales. That's the only conclusion I can draw from the news that Microsoft has pledged to work with NBC to build a copyright cop into the Zune in return for selling NBC's popular TV shows through the Zune store.

Somewhere on Israeli security researcher Aviv Raff's Web site is proof-of-concept code for a zero-day exploit that affects Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.

According to a study just released by consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, you -- that's right: you -- may be the most important factor in the security of your organization.

It's a truism that smart money finds places to invest during a downturn. Today's Sprint-Clearwire deal is a perfect illustration.

With its $500 million investment in the $12 billion Sprint-Clearwire partnership, Google buys itself a hedge against the possibility that the open access rules it fought to link to the C Block of the 700-MHz spectrum might be flouted.

Corporate calling. Corporate who? Long, boring, time-wasting, day-deadening, you can't get out of it, corporate online Web and phone meeting, that's who. (This is my Internet Age version of a knock, knock joke, and just about as unfunny.) But if all-hands-on-deck meetings are like death and taxes -- i.e., unavoidable -- at least WebEx is working to energize them so that they'll be more useful. Call it collaboration on Web steroids.

If you want your IT group to be thought of as a center of innovation for your organization, you've got to get the attention of business management. Internal marketing can help.

An unusual alliance of tech and media companies is betting billions of dollars on the as-yet-unproved technology known as WiMax. Will they finally usher in the wireless Web? Or is this fated to be another one of those cumbersome tech alliances that go down in flames with technology that doesn't work?

The 3G iPhone reports are off the charts. We still have over four weeks until Jobsnote at WWDC, but everyone and their mother believes the 3G iPhone is going to hit store shelves in the very near future. Here's the latest scuttlebutt.

I had an interesting discussion with John Newton, the co-founder of Alfresco, recently. I'm a little star-struck by this guy. It's hard to get much higher on the food chain when you look at Newton's credentials. Not only did he co-found Documentum, he's also less than five years into the launch of Alfresco, arguably one of the biggest disrupters to appear on the enterprise software radar in years.

The official word from Kaj Arnö of MySQL / Sun is out: Portions of MySQL that were originally being considered as closed-source components will now be open source as well.  Good news, bad news, or none of the above?  I take the third view.  The real issue is, again, not open vs. closed code, but how you engage the open source community -- how you clue them in to what kind of company you are.

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