Ron Van Holst

Ron is an engineer who enjoys discovering new technologies and new ideas. He also likes to meet new people and learn from the stories of their experiences. Ron is interested in applying his knowledge of High Performance Computing (HPC) technology and applications to make businesses more competitive.

Homepage: http://whyhire.me/ron_van_holst


Posts by Ron Van Holst

digitaleconomy.gc.ca

May 12, 2010 - 1:48 pm

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Posted in - General Info | 2 comments

Canada’s Digital Economy Strategy is now open for public consultation, go to digitaleconomy.gc.ca .  If you have strong opinions on IT and the future of Canada, now is the time to speak.  There are 5 areas of discussion:

Innovation using Digital Technologies
Digital Infrastructure
Growing the ICT Industry
Canada’s Digital Content
Building Digital Skills

Why blog?

May 7, 2010 - 4:22 pm

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Posted in - General Info, 4 Green Tech, 5 Social Enabler? | 4 comments

I’ve been thinking about what motivates people leave comments on blog posts or Internet articles.  Chris Lau commented on one of his own posts that comments only correspond to about 0.5% of page views.  In my comments I mentioned that a panelist in the referenced video noted that people who comment are non-representative of the [...]

War of the Worlds or Perfect Storm

May 5, 2010 - 8:21 am

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Posted in 1 Mobile Revolution, 2 Defining the Cloud, 5 Social Enabler?, 6 Cool Tech | 2 comments

I’d like to refer to a couple of articles that help to illustrate that the smart phone wave is more than just a cool new gadget, but the collision of powerful empires.

War of the Worlds: RIM invented the smart phone market, and we’re proud as Canadians that a Canadian company is an innovative leader [...]

One Ring to Rule them all

May 4, 2010 - 10:45 pm

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Posted in - General Info, 2 Defining the Cloud, 6 Cool Tech, Misc | 2 comments

10Mbps, 100Mbps, 1Gbps, 10 Gbps, _______
So what is the next number in this series?  If my 12 year old son was asked to complete this series in his math class, I’m pretty sure that he would be able to put in 100Gbps, without even knowing what bps means.
For those of us in the IT industry [...]

Virtualization Technology Adoption – part 5 – High Performance Computing

April 30, 2010 - 2:07 pm

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Posted in - General Info, 2 Defining the Cloud, 4 Green Tech, 6 Cool Tech | No comments

Now we’ve come to the earliest stage of market adoption, the Innovators.  We have also come to the most interesting of computing classes, supercomputing, also commonly referred to as High Performance Computing (HPC).  That HPC is the most interesting class of computing, is my perspective only, as are all these posts.  If you find my [...]

Virtualization Technology Adoption – part 4 – Embedded Processors

April 29, 2010 - 10:17 pm

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Posted in - General Info, 2 Defining the Cloud, 6 Cool Tech | No comments

By now a trend is appearing – I’m working my way back through the technology adoption lifecycle.  In the new year I was reading some blog posts and vendor literature on virtual machines in embedded computing.  It was this reading that got me thinking about different value propositions of virtual machines in different computing classes [...]

Virtualization Technology Adoption – part 3 – Desktop Computers

April 28, 2010 - 4:24 pm

Posted in - General Info, 2 Defining the Cloud, 4 Green Tech, Misc | 3 comments

It’s Wednesday, the middle of the week, and also the middle of this series on analyzing virtualization technology by market adoption and value proposition.  We’ve covered mainframe computing and compute servers, equipment the average person never sees, and even the IT professional usually administers remotely.  We all use this type of computing, when we see [...]

Virtualization Technology Adoption – part 2 – Compute Servers

April 28, 2010 - 9:57 am

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Posted in - General Info, 2 Defining the Cloud, 4 Green Tech, Misc | 2 comments

In the first post of this series, we looked at the technology adoption life cycle, seven value propositions for market adoption of virtualization, five classes of computing and the maturity of virtualization in mainframe computers.
Over the last several years, virtual machines have seen major adoption in the commodity compute server market.  I think it would [...]

Virtualization Technology Adoption – part 1

April 27, 2010 - 4:19 pm

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Posted in - General Info, 4 Green Tech, Misc | 1 comment

This is a reworking of some thoughts on virtualization technology originally posted on my personal blog.  I’m breaking it into parts so that I can elaborate a little more on each aspect.
The success of any technology depends on many factors and it is helpful to reference a technology by it’s adoption in the market.  One [...]

That’s going to hurt tomorrow!

April 20, 2010 - 6:44 pm

Posted in - General Info | 1 comment

Sunday was a beautiful day and the boys took a football out to the park to play catch.  The sun was irresistible, so I walked out to the park to join them.  As I turned the corner to the park, I heard one of them say, “Hey there’s Dad, now we can play a game [...]