kitcolbert

Kit Colbert

Senior Cloud Strategist and Principal Engineer

Biography

Kit Colbert is Chief Architect and Principal Engineer with the Office of the CTO at VMware, supporting the strategy and development of innovative solutions from infrastructure to end-user computing. He is the chief architect for the Horizon Workspace product, which enables seamless multi-device access to corporate apps and data. Previously, he was the lead management architect for the vCenter Operations suite of products. At the start of his career, he was the technical lead on the creation, development, and delivery of the VMotion and Storage VMotion features in vSphere. Kit holds a ScB in Computer Science from Brown University and is a recognized thought-leader on cloud computing trends and cloud management. He speaks regularly at industry conferences and on the main stage at VMworld and is the engineering voice for the Office of the CTO blog.

Posts by Kit Colbert

kitcolbert

How to Manage Your Cloud of Choice

May 8, 2013
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How to Manage Your Cloud of Choice

I’m at Interop Las Vegas today presenting a talk entitled How to Manage Your Cloud of Choice. The motivation for this is talk comes from our customers trying to wrap their heads around hybrid cloud and understand how to make the best use of it. The most basic question customers ask about hybrid cloud is whether it makes sense for their organization to adopt or not. As you can imagine, there are tradeoffs in security, performance, SLA guarantees, cost, and much more between private, hybrid, and public clouds. Each organization will have different constraints and priorities. Thus the decision of whether to move to hybrid or public cloud – or more specifically what apps, data, and services to move – will be different...

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Who feeds Paris? Changing the mindset of IT

April 3, 2013
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Who feeds Paris? Changing the mindset of IT

Today I’m giving a keynote at Cloud Connect Silicon Valley entitled “Who Feeds Paris?” The question comes from a book called “ Naked Economics ” by Charles Wheelan.  What he means by “who feeds Paris?” is that there are

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Bringing Together vSphere and Operations Management

February 8, 2013
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Over the last few years, we’ve seen the need for operations management and vSphere to be closely coupled as customers were realizing the value of the two operating hand-in-hand. VMware responded to this customer need and announced today a new vSphere offering – vSphere with Operations Management, or vSOM. The bundle couples vSphere together with the vCenter Operations Management Suite (vC Ops for short). It’s a great addition that fills a gap in our portfolio, but I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s take a step back to understand the value of this new offering.

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Cloud Management 2013 Predictions

December 18, 2012
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Cloud Management 2013 Predictions

2012 was an exciting year for VMware’s management portfolio. Some of the highlights included VMworld Europe , where we launched new versions of our management products. In addition, we welcomed DynamicOps and Pattern Insight into the VMware family. With the acquisition of DynamicOps, VMware wanted to provide its customers with support for heterogeneous infrastructures. You can read more about the work we’re doing in this area in my previous blog . vCenter Operations (vC Ops) , vCloud Automation Center (vCAC, formerly DynamicOps), and vFabric Application Director (AppD) all have support for both VMware and non-VMware virtual infrastructure and clouds. vC Ops and vCAC also support physical machines. This is a critical capability as customers have some...

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Heterogeneous Cloud Management at VMworld Europe

October 9, 2012
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Heterogeneous Cloud Management at VMworld Europe

In a recent blog post , Steve Herrod outlined how VMware products are embracing support for heterogeneous environments. VMware’s Enterprise Management products are no exception. Heterogeneity is important because while many of our customers have chosen a VMware-first policy, the reality is that their environments may not be completely vSphere: there are pockets of physical servers that have yet to be virtualized, developers run around IT’s back and go straight to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to test their latest changes, or the company makes an acquisition whose datacenters don’t run vSphere. So any management solution must be able to support heterogeneous environments. This is exactly what we’ve designed our Enterprise Management products to do.

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Managing the Software-Defined Datacenter

August 27, 2012
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Managing the Software-Defined Datacenter

As we kick off VMworld , there’s a lot of excitement about the software-defined datacenter and all the benefits that it brings. But the benefits of the software-defined datacenter can only be realized if you can manage it. Management here covers a broad range of disciplines, including knowing if there is a performance problem, having insight into your datacenter’s compliance status, understanding your costs, and enabling self-service provisioning for users while maintaining control. Management is critical to operating the software-defined datacenter, yet management of the software-defined datacenter is much different than in traditional systems. Moving From Traditional Management to Software-Defined Datacenter Management Traditional systems consist of dedicated infrastructure tied to specific applications, leading to tightly integrated vertical silos. Each of...

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