As a long time enterprise infrastructure specialist, I’ve spent countless hours trying to optimize the performance of environments.  Early in my career, I spent some time on a team who worked very closely with the monitoring team where I learned how hard it was to correlate the volumes of data collected. We were collecting so much data about our environment that it was almost overwhelming. Things like the temperature of the CPU, how many storage IOs were pending, and memory usage was.  We had all this awesome data and what did we do with it?  We set up monitoring to make sure numbers didn’t cross a certain threshold.  When it did cross that threshold, we sent an alert.  All this data at our fingertips and all we used it was for alerting.  I knew something was off, but I was green and didn’t  understand that we were missing the bigger picture. That was a long time ago,Read More →

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For the last few years many IT organizations have been moving some workloads to the cloud but in my experience, most enterprises have a “no cloud” policy still.  That policy is, of course, not quite enforced and they have some cloud services being consumed due to shadow IT or Software-as-a-Service.  Most analysis today are predicting in the next few years the “no cloud” policy will be nearly extinct.  The problem many IT operations folks have with this is that you can’t outsource responsibility.  Now, what exactly does that mean? My favorite example of this has to do with what cloud providers think backup is versus what an enterprise thinks a backup is.  A cloud service provider things backup is a way to protect itself from failures they cause, but an IT operations person sees backup as a way to protect the organization against any conceivable.  The last thing they want is some VP calling and yelling atRead More →

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In my twenty years of enterprise infrastructure experience, I’ve noticed a few things that are universal to every organization.  One of the most universally time-consuming things about working IT is usually disaster recovery testing. We all know that business continuity is extremely important, but that doesn’t make testing and executing recovery plans any less expensive.  It takes compute power to takes full and incremental copies of the data and, of course, storage to house the backups.Organizations also spend weeks and weeks of people’s time planning, documenting, executing, and remediating disaster recovery plans.  Until needed business resiliency often seems like a waste of money and time – but that all changes when you need it. When finally needed everyone remembers what a great investment data protection is, but what about all the rest of time?  Can’t data resilience be more than a one-trick pony? The simple answer is “yes” it is possible to use all the data copiesRead More →

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Up until a few years ago security was an afterthought in most IT organizations. It wasn’t until data breaches started to become public that nearly every company found a renewed focus on security. The investments for cyber security over the next 5 years is, according to some IT analysts, is going to exceed over $1 trillion. One major challenge facing organizations as they wrap with hands around cyber security is the lack of information about changes in the environment.  Change is a constant in IT environments, but for a long time, we have had a severe lack of auditing and tracking of what has actually changed.  To address that gap IT shops have implemented centralized audit logging,  but that has left some serious gaps. One of the biggest gaps I see is that audit logging is more about information and a lot less about how that information is presented.  Let’s take a look at the simple exampleRead More →

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