May 17, 2012

Organic Cloud : Modeling After The Natural World

treeI am very prone to drifting off into thoughts about patterns in real life and how they correlate to things I deal with in my work life. I am fascinated by the thought of the constantly blurring line between ourselves and technology. It is really amazing to think about how social and mobile technologies have changed they way we work, communicate, and relax. I am just as guilty as the next guy of constantly tweeting during my vacation, contacting someone through Facebook only, or the fact that I have not written an actual letter in over ten years.

It is out of this day-dreaming that I often start thinking about current cloud designs and how I would change them. In my mind both public and private cloud have several core demands that have been around for a while and are an essential part of expectations in any computing utility. A simple list of these would be things like being cost effective, performant, reliable, secure, and scalable. I could spend a large amount of time defining the rules about what makes a good “cloud”. But instead I will move forward with the assumption that a cloud service provides the same or better relative utility while being cost effective to the consumer. You can find a great many blogs and personalities out there that do a much better job of defining a robust cloud service offering. My thoughts our more focus on how that actually happens. [Read more...]

Lightning Strikes Twice : VMware vExpert 2011

Like many other VMware friends, I also received an email informing me I was awarded VMware vExpert for 2011. This is the second year for this award and I am extremely

gonggrateful for the honor. Like every vExpert should; I want to thank everyone at VMware behind the great social media and community and especially thank John Troyer for his leadership. I don’t think people realize how much awesomeness has come out of the work John has done, because it is so difficult to quantify. I also want to thank Duncan Epping who was when I started, and still is an inspiration as a blogger and Twitter junkie.

Fair warning: it is at this point of the blog post I will get a little retrospective and sappy.

Sometimes it is tough to measure success outside of just projects, sales goals, or training milestones. I am often so obsessed with *the next thing* that I never take time to fully enjoy a sense of accomplishment for what I have done. For me, the vExpert email is a point where I can stop and think over what I did over the last year.

And so I encourage you to do the same. And not just in light of your career. Sit still for a couple minutes and think of all the things you have accomplished in the last year as a parent, professional, friend, and as a partner.

There are many ways to measure success in life and not all of them can be easily recognized. I can think of so many great people that helped me get to where I am now that deserve way more praise than I do. So since today is a day I am taking to feel good about what I have done; I encourage you to do the same.

.nick

DevOps & IT Skills : Guest Appearance on The Cloudcast (.net)

I had the privilege a little over a week ago of being a guest on the The Cloudcast (.net) podcast that is hosted by Aaron Delp and Brian Gracely. This is my first podcast appearance and was a real honor to be a part of it.

I was interviewed on my past experience with Operations and Development processes alignment and the DevOps moment in IT today (see my post on my experiences here). I also was asked about the trend in skillsets within the Infrastructure world.

Brian and Aaron have really put together a nice format for the show and go here to listen to my episode and more.

.nick

Back to the Geek Future : Cool Old Stuff

Over the weekend I got to visit my great-uncle who spent his career as an electrical engineer working on supercomputers (among other things) for Exxon from the 60’s on. He is retired now and lives on an awesome spot of land in the Texas Hill Country. I got a chance to bring the family by and visit and while I was there starting talking about cloud-computing. My Great-Uncle then started to bring out some cool stuff from his career to show me. I had a blast seeing this stuff and thought I would share the pictures with you.

An Applied Data Research Hexamatic/16 (hexadecimal slide calculator)

from phone 1165

[Read more...]

The VCE Model : Yes, it is different

This post comes out of a slide deck I authored last week for a partner event. I decided I was going to try and illustrate why the VCE model really is such a different approach to other datacenter and private cloud models.

Normally my blog is light on vendor specific commentary. I see myself more as a virtualization geek who just happens to work for an awesome company (EMC) than a hardcore analysis/blogger. But I have seen so much messaging lately that distorts the VCE message, I really felt the need to offer my own perspective. [Read more...]

Vision of a creator : The silent revolution in Technology

This post is going to do a couple things I don’t like to do. I am going to use myself as an example. I don’t mind sharing experiences or relaying what I care about. But, I find too much public self-reflection is vain and not much value to others.

But I don’t know how else to write this without referring to my own personal experience and approach I have taken, unplanned as it was. So I ask your forgiveness early in this post. I am nothing special and hold no special wisdom or natural ability over you. I may or may not be looking simply from a different perspective. And the only way any solution is solved, improved, or discovered is through approaching from different angles and/or dumb luck. [Read more...]