In Enterprise IT we’re all used to life cycle managed of equipment.  For a long time, one of the most painful areas for this was the storage array. Every few years it became time to rip out the old gear and bring in the new.  That process has gotten much better, but one thing still bothers me. What happens to the software that I paid for when I bought that storage array? The idea isn’t limited to storage arrays either.  Enterprise IT shops buy software to do something,  then their needs change, and they replace that software. As long as they got the business value from the software, no one cares that they essentially throw the bits away.  When dealing with big vendors, like VMware or HPE, this is where the Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) comes into play.  It’s an agreement between a vendor and a customer saying that vendor agrees to provide and support software inRead More →

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In: Business, EMCWorld, Infrastructure

1996 was a memorable year. It was the first year of the MLS in the United States, the Nintendo 64 was brand new, Windows NT 4.0 was released, I graduated high school, and some friends and I started a local Internet Service Provider. It was the year my passion for technology transformed into a career. In the decades since then, I’ve picked up many skills to bolster my toolkit ranging from networking, Oracle databases, Unix administration, programming, and storage architect. Learning new technology and keeping your skills current is something everyone in IT, from operations to development, understands the importance of.  While learning new tech is always a great idea, too many people often overlook two important skills: speaking and selling. Since I recently spoke on speaking,  I wanted to spend some time talking about selling – and I don’t mean a person trying to sell their wares to a customer. Selling, in this context, is takingRead More →

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In: Business, Speaking

Last week I moderated a panel at the annual Cincinnati VMware User Group conference with some great panelists. As a moderator, I had a pretty simple job: enable the panel to educate and entertain the audience.  Ask some questions, engage the audience, and don’t let anyone ramble on. Pretty straight forward, but when I got off stage one of the staff members commented that it was hard to find IT people who are decent at speaking to a large audience. I dismissed his comment at the time,  but it got me thinking about being a high school freshman. That was the first year I had to write and give an actual presentation to the class. I don’t remember the topic at all, but what I do remember was being filled with anxiety at the seemingly daunting task in front of me. Everyone is looking at you, judging you, waiting for you to fail. Ok, so maybe theyRead More →

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In: Business, Speaking

All my life I’ve been a fan of learning new things.  I remember my mom reading to me when I was young and just craved more.  I remember the exact moment when my love of learning into a passion for technology,  specifically computers. It was the day my dad brought a Commodore Vic 20.  My life changed forever as he unboxed the (now) giant floppy drives. It wasn’t long before I was writing a basic program to make an ASCII bird fly around the screen. I knew I had reached the pinnacle of technology.  Surely nothing could every be cooler than making an ASCII bird fly on my monitor?  I was, of course,  wrong. For decades after that moment I play with countless technology.  Software development, hardware hacking, bits and bytes, and packets – I’ve done it all.  In my professional career, I’ve thought about how the technology helps business.  Every modern business runs on people, time,Read More →

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In: Business

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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In: Business

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: Backup, Business

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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In: Backup, Business

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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In: Business

Today I decided I was going to play a game of racquetball.  It’s been reasonably nice out and that put me in the mood to get active.  I’ve never played racquetball before, but I knew it was going to be intense. A little over a year ago I would never had thought about playing racquetball – but that was over 300 pounds ago.  I like to say i’ve lost over two Justin Biebers, it just sounds more impressive. So I wake up early with my buddy and head to a local YMCA to meet my buddy, take a tour of the building, and hear to the courts.  He explains to me how to play – seemed simple enough, so we geared up.  We started off slow and leisurely hitting the ball around untul deciding it was time to get serious. Did I mention i’d never played racquetball before?  Even having lost 300 pounds i’m a long wayRead More →

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In: Business

Everyone seems to be talking about EMC’s new private cloud collaboration offering Syncplicity.  And why shouldn’t they be, from everything I’ve seen it looks like a great offering if you are looking to allow corporate users to easily and safely access their files anywhere and on any device while keeping your data stored on your own datacenter.   The basic idea is simple and elegant. It allows you to offer a service where your users can sync and share files across all the various platforms.  How does it all work?  You have four basic elements: client access, authentication, application nodes, and storage. The storage part of this picture is what sets this apart from the dropboxes of the world. On-premises infrastructure.  Rather than pushing your data to an external provider you keep all your data on your own equipment in your datacenter. You’ve got two options for storing you’re files EMC Atoms and EMC Isilon. The secondRead More →

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In: Business, Cloud