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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A few weeks back my wife and I went to spend the weekend in Louisville, Kentucky for no particular reason. When I first mentioned the idea of this road trip she immediate got excited about one of her favorite places to eat in the area. She talks about some particular dish with such passion that I couldn’t help but get excited to try it. Fast forward for lunch that weekend, and boy was I disappointed.  Sure the food was good, but that’s it.  I doubt anything could have lived up to the hype and met my expectations. This constantly happens with IT sales teams, usually with the best of intentions. It all starts with an announcement of a technology or product concept being announces long before it exists. Fantastic claims are made about the performance, ease of use, or some other awesome feature. Once the product is nearing general availability, the sales hounds are released to attackRead More →

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Julian Wood of WoodITWork joins me in a conversation discussing what Dell Technologies needs to do to support the enterprise. Is VMware’s Cross-Cloud offering coupled with Cloud Foundation enough to carry Dell to a point that Pivotal Labs picks up the slack? Read More →

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In: Infrastructure

I started my career in the information technology industry when I was young, so young that I was still in high school.  I wasn’t working at Burger King or the mall like most of my friends, instead I was putting my passion for technology to work bringing the people of the Cincinnati area dial-up internet access. A few friends and I had connected with a local businessman and, somehow, the idea to start a new company was formed.  In the beginning, it was a handful of us, with me and my friend Todd doing all the server and development work. We spent countless hours of the mid-90s building servers, creating web pages, and working hard in out tiny server room. It felt like the pinnacle of technology to me. The whole world was at our fingertips just waiting for us the capture it. Roles shifting and Todd moved on to bigger and better-paying things.  Soon after heRead More →

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In: Cloud, Storage

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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Developer turned network engineer turned developer, Matt Oswalt discusses the goal of continuous integration networking. The goal of making changes to the network at peak and ensuring the change achieves the desired result. Matt introduces the concept of his open source project ToDD and how continuous integration is a achievable long term goal.    Show Notes  ToDD Github  Spirient Virtualization Field Day 6 Presentation Matt’s blog Touchless network configuration usecase Interop  Read More →

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In: Infrastructure