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Travers Nicholas on
Monday, 12th of July 2010 at 03:09:23 AM
15 EMEA based vSpecialists, too much caffeine, the smell of last night’s pizza, and a seemingly impossible list of tasks to accomplish – that was Geek Week Q2 2010.
As a vSpecialist at EMC, we attend a lab construction week as part of the on-boarding and initiation ritual. The instructions are simple: take this list of applications and infrastructure configurations, and work as a team to install and configure them all with the kit we provide to you before the week ends. There are multiple objectives for Geek Week, the main ones being; get the team working together, learn about integrating EMC, VMware, and Cisco technologies, and develop a good understanding of technologies that are not yet released, so we are best able to support our customers at product launch time. Continue reading Geek week : How to build an empire in 6 days
by
nick on
Sunday, 27th of June 2010 at 06:25:19 PM
Seems like I somehow get myself involved in everything lately… This week I am headed to Cisco Live 2010 although for this one, I was begging to go.
While a true blue EMC guy and VMware lover. I am also secretly a big fan of Cisco stuff. I love how they are always on the cusp of new technology. I also love networking and I am a huge fan of the new movements into Data Center Networking 2.0. My VMworld session this year is on virtualization and how it affects the way we look at networking.
I will spend my time this week tweeting and blogging about what I see and hear at Cisco Live. I will also spend some time at the great EMC booths including our Journey to the Private Cloud booth. Feel free to drop by and say hi. Also, EMC is hosting [...]
Continue reading What happens in Vegas… : Cisco Live 2010!
by
nick on
Saturday, 20th of March 2010 at 10:20:25 AM
Yesterday I officially passed my first EMC certification test. I am now a full fledged EMCPA! So I know, this isn’t the highest-level and I am not going to impress the ladies down at the civic center. But, this is the first *storage* certificate for me and I am happier than a tornado in a trailer park.
I am working towards the Technical Architect track and so this test (E20-001) was the first step. I went through the Web Classroom training which was good. But the real secret is studying the ISM book (Amazon link).
I really enjoyed the material on fibre-channel protocol and the in-depth work calculating IOPs/capacity. I ended up making a huge Excel spreadsheet so I could play with the formulas.
The test was challenging. Some of the questions were not in the book or Web [...]
Continue reading EMC Certification : My Experience
by
nick on
Friday, 5th of February 2010 at 08:30:29 AM
This post is a big deal for me personally. It is the first public acknowledgment of a major change in my life. This blog post will be about me announcing this change; but it will also be about why I am doing it and what lessons I feel can be learned. [...]
Continue reading Change is good : Fear & Atmosphere
by
nick on
Wednesday, 25th of November 2009 at 05:37:41 PM
Image via Wikipedia
Many times I have seen situations where an application or process grows incrementally to a point where it is no longer able to meet it’s SLAs (whether official or imaginary). The cause of this can vary but is usually:
Overworked/Unbalanced teams - Too much effort dedicated to new feature-add and not enough to technical debt Poorly planned systems – Designs for immediate need without taking into account needs for things like instantiation or scaling of decoupled components. Poor maintenance/understanding – Lack of knowledge or effort to tune application/process to more effectively use resources. This can exist in both the application and infrastructure groups.
Usually the performance degradation is known early on but accepted because the business users are not making a big enough stink; or at least not big enough to reduce the drive for new features. In addition, lack of monitoring [...]
Continue reading Optimization vs. Scaling: How virtualization affects the scorecard
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