Sneak has never been in on the birth of new acronym - but he can now add this to his CV after a natter to analyst firm IDC's Chris Ingle.

Discussing datacentres and backup strategies in general, Ingle related the story of a firm whose backup strategy was what he said was a 'cave' underneath its building connected by a network link to another 'cave' nearby.

It was fairly easy for Sneak to knock out an acronym for this - Compute And Virtualisation Environment - easy, peasy - job done! Consulting an online acronym checker showed that CAVE had been acronym-ised many times before, and although there were many close ones, none fitted Sneak's version exactly. OK, maybe some words are the same and Sneak can almost feel the sneers of derision emanating from IT managers world-wide, but with application virtualisation on the climb, royalties from patenting the acronym should keep Sneak in Irn Bru for the foreseeable future.

Speaking of ancient ancestors, it seems that virtualisation rollouts may soon require more personnel skilled in the art of capacity planning - that well-known craft, critical in getting mainframes to run efficiently. It seems that experts in capacity planning could well be important in firms' virtualisation of production business critical applications. Would these people be called CAVEmen wondered Sneak - warming to his task of trying to create a fairly tenuous link to his headline...

09 Jul 2008