First off, before the flames start (if anybody actually reads this), this article is from the perspective of a consultant currently working with roughly two dozen web start-ups. Based on what I’ve observed with numerous customers over the past five years, and the current reality, in my world, these tools don’t matter. Most of them are relegated to academic operations, the kind of people who keep Usenix going but just aren’t part of my world.

• Any Linux Distribution that is not RedHat CentOS, or Ubuntu
• CFENGINE
• Itanium or any non x86-64 processing architectures
  
• BCFG2
• FreeBSD
• OS X Server (It never really was relevant, to anybody, anywhere, but it’s fun to
• CVSup
• Windows Server
• Solaris (Sorry Tim, I’ve got nothing but love for you, but Sun has long since lost it’s relevance for web start-ups)
• Oracle
• SQL Server
• Cold Fusion (wtf is that anyways?)
• Andrew File System

I make this pledge. If you’re using more than two of these technologies in a vc-funded start-up newly founded in the past two years, I owe you a scotch.

“honestly I believe Google is a true evil empire”.– Serguei Beloussov

I just had a great talk with Serguei Beloussov from Parallels. He had some interesting things to say about Parallels, as well as Google’s effect on the hosting industry. Click here to read the full interview.

Re posted from DatacenterJunkie:

I’ve been in Chicago for exactly 9.5 hours, and HostingCon is already better than I had hoped for. I landed at 2:30PM, and was checked into my hotel by 3:30. Daniel, BitPusher’s CEO arrived at about 7:15. We mostly relaxed until 8:30, enjoying room service and the view, the we headed out to an informal get together at the W.

We met up with some of the guys from MessageWire, and DedicatedNOW in the lobby, and spend some time with the owner of FortressITX. Once we realized that drinks were on SoftLayer, we chatted up their CEO Lance Crosby, and spent a couple of hours enjoying Macallan, and talking about SoftLayer’s rapid ascent. I’m going to meet up with Lance later on during the conference to do a quick interview about where he started, where they are today, and where they’re going.

This is shaping up to be the most exciting conference of 2008. We decided to call it an early night to save our livers and actually make it to the conference on time.

OSCON Running a Successful User Group with Selena Deckelmann and Gabrielle Roth

Since I don’t really cover software here, I had to cherry pick the sessions I’ll be going to this week. I only expect to make about half of the sessions that on my personal schedule. The rest of the time I hope to be doing interviews and milling about the hallway track.

Here’s my OSCON schedule if you’d like to have a chat.

I just posted my photos from the expo hall on DatacenterJunkie.

Introducing HP’s addition to the Datacenter In A Box Market, the HP POD

#Structure08 Interview with Scott Mueller of NewServers.com, Dedicated Utility

Liveblogging GigaOM’s Structure ‘08.

I’m currently LiveBlogging Struucture ‘08 over at DatacenterJunkie

I’m in Burlingame today and tomorrow live-blogging Velocity for my NetworkWorld Blog