New Chapter – Same Book
Today is my first day in a new role; I'm joining EMC as an Advisory Systems Engineer in the Enterprise team. If you'd look at my LinkedIn profile, this might seem like a big change [...]
UnityVSA – Part 4: VVOLs
In part 1 of this series I shared the move to HTML5 was the most exciting part of Unity. Frankly this was because of the increased compatibility and performance of Unisphere for Unity, but more [...]
UnityVSA – Part 3: Initial Configuration Wizard
When last we meet, we had deployed a UnityVSA virtual appliance; it was up and running sitting at the prompt for the Initial Configuration Wizard. This post is part of a series covering the EMC [...]
UnityVSA – Part 2: Deploy
This post is part of a series covering the EMC Free and Frictionless software products. Go to the first post for a table of contents. So, to start this off let's go to the EMC [...]
UnityVSA – Part 1: HTML5 FTW!
This post is part of a series covering the EMC Free and Frictionless software products. Go to the first post for a table of contents. In my last post, I shared my pet project tracking [...]
Tracking EMC Elect Tweets @ EMC World
Staying abreast of technology is simultaneously a challenging and rewarding part of my career. Now and then I like to dive deep into an area to get my hands dirty. Recently I've had the itch [...]
“It’s not the…”
I saw this meme on my social media feed, and it reminded me of my first rule of troubleshooting. Never, ever, try to prove it's not your area. If you're in IT, you're familiar with 'critical' [...]
The ‘Value Added’ in VAR
Eric Hagstrom and I sat down to discuss the value VAR/Partners bring to the table, why they exist, what you should expect from them, and some advice from behind the scenes. Listen on his blog, [...]
vSphere HTML5 Web Client – Fling
Last week, a small light appeared at the end of the dim tunnel called the vSphere Web Client. If you're a vSphere engineer, or even just a user managing applications or server; you know what [...]
IsilonSD – Part 6: Final Thoughts
Now that I've spent some time with Isilon SD; how does it compare to my experience with its physical big brother? Where does the software defined version fit? This post is part of a series [...]
IsilonSD – Part 5: Monitoring Activity
For my deployment of IsilonSD Edge, I want to keep this running in my lab, installing systems is often far easier than operating them (especially troubleshooting issues). However an idle system isn't really a good [...]
IsilonSD – Part 4: Adding & Removing Nodes
One of the core functions of the Isilon product is scaling. In it's physical incarnation you can scale up to 144 nodes with over 50 petabytes in a single namespace. Those limits are because of hardware, as [...]
IsilonSD – Part 3: Deploy a Cluster (Successfully)
With proper planning and setup of the prerequisites (see Part 2), the actual deployment of the IsilonSD Edge cluster is fairly straight-forward. If you experience issues during this section (see Part 1) it's very likely [...]
IsilonSD – Part 2: Test Platform
This post is part of a series covering the EMC Free and Frictionless software products. Go to the first post for a table of contents. So… last post I figured out IsilonSD Edge needs (at [...]
IsilonSD – Part 1: Quick Deploy (or how I failed to RTM)
This post is part of a series covering the EMC Free and Frictionless software products. Go to the first post for a table of contents. As I mentioned in my previous post, EMC recently released [...]
Free and Frictionless – A Series
One of the most common statements I've made to vendors over the years is "why should I pay to test your software?". To this day I still don't understand this; if I'm going to purchase [...]
Leap Day 2016 – VMAX & All Flash
Happy Leap Day; a day every four years I'm reminded how technologists across the globe can manage to work together to ensure our systems all stay on (relatively) the same time, even with odd things [...]
Soapbox Topic=”FUD”
<soapbox> FUD; Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. More specifically for this blog, a vendor who attempts to discredit a competitor rather than speak of their own value. Be it with straw man arguments, comparing apples to [...]
Bulk Upload ISOs to vCloud Air
I've been leveraging vCloud Air recently for development and testing. The ability to run nested ESXi in the cloud, coupled with the promotions for free credits makes it a convenient playground for running a plethora [...]
ProcessControl
I was looking through some old code and found a little gem I built almost ten years ago called ProcessControl. I'm sure you're familiar with the ability to adjust the affinity and priority of processes [...]
Hello World
I wish I had my first piece of code, or even remembered what language it was. Sadly I don't, so I'll borrow someone else's code, and insert something close to my comments. I recall from [...]