Columnists' corner: As a technology visionary, Tom Yager foresees how to take service-oriented architectures to the next level: virtualization. A virtualization-oriented architecture, in fact, or as acronyms go, VOA. "I coined the phrase VOA to describe an approach to finer-grained system virtualization that builds on a transparently integrated combination of system, storage, and infrastructure virtualization that doesn't abstract reality. Abstraction breeds complexity," Yager explains. "VOA just blows reality away."

Databases: In-memory databases are nothing new, to be sure, but Jon Udell writes that memory is often overlooked as a great place to store databases for faster search and retrieval.

Podcasts: Bob Garza's Zero Day blog is chock full of podcasts, including an interview with Microsoft about how it protects 200 million customers every day, a discussion with Dr. Gary McGraw, author of the new book 'Software Security' and other topics such as intrusion prevention, network access control devices, and Apple Mac OS X vulnerabilities.

Quoteworthy: Will enterprises yield control of their IT to a large, faceless utility? I suspect this will go on to a limited degree. But companies still will want to keep their most critical systems and prized data in-house. So I'm willing to meet Nicholas Carr halfway. -- Paul Krill, in a Tech Watch post titled Did we pay the computing bill this month?

Personal note: I'll be on vacation -- Flyfishing in the Florida Keys! -- beginning tomorrow, but returning next Wednesday morning to resume this InfoWorld Daily blog as well as my InfoWorld Daily Podcast. In the meantime, please feel free to browse my archives. Past blog entries can be found here; the collection of podcasts resides at this link.

Posted by Tom Sullivan on February 15, 2006 11:16 AM