Cambridge vs Oxford, Xen vs VMWare

Last Friday I went to the College IT Conference, which is an annual get-together of college IT managers from Oxford and Cambridge universities. Note that these are the IT managers at the residential colleges, as opposed to the centralised IT managers for the universities' faculties.

It was a pleasant day, although the semi-jocular rivalry between the universities - and even between the colleges at the same universities - frequently came to the fore. One point I found particularly entertaining was the fact that Cambridge colleges tend to use Xen - created at Cambridge, natch - and Oxford colleges tend to go for VMWare, probably for the same reason.

Another amusing moment arose when, during a roundtable session, someone suggested that neighbouring colleges might want to use each other as backup, thus upping redundancy and cutting down costs. To which the appropriate reply is: "You're only thinking of this now?"

Given this sort of counter-productive disconnection, the purpose of the conference becomes ever clearer. Anyway, keep an eye out for the photo story we'll be putting up covering the event, particularly some interesting views that were expressed regarding virtualisation and the cloud...