I have worked most of my professional life with systems built with Intel x86, x64. Often there is little hardware available in the work environment to learn and try out new things. I enjoy learning by doing and to begin to better understand the technology looked to build a cluster of Intel NUCs. My goals of cluster …

Working in a technical team distributed across multiple time zones makes it difficult to collaborate and keep everyone on the same page. I’ve used various communications tools to try and help with this and today the team I am working with started to look at Slack. Slack seems ideal for our needs as it provides easily …

On starting to look at learning using Ansible to manage Windows hosts, first step was to setup a test lab. Setup an Ubuntu 14.04 or CentOS 7 and a Windows 2008 R2 virtual machines. Install Ansible (Ubuntu) apt-get install software-properties-common apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible apt-get update apt-get install …

I recently came across the role SRE, I didn’t know what this was so researched it a little and found that it refers to Site Reliability Engineers after reading around the subject here is my considered opinion. The classic sysadmin role could be defined in generic terms as “IT operations staff responsible …

NetApp has often been a pioneer of bleeding edge concepts in storage. When designing data ONTAP and the WAFL file system they were the first to look at creating a virtual control plane for data. They also pioneered fully non disruptive upgrades when the introduced clustered data ONTAP. They then introduced ONTAP Edge …

How vVols Will Help The constraints and issues which VVOLs address include, LUNs introduce constrains such as the quantity of LUNs we can present, having lots of LUNs each with unused space is in efficient as such we currently shared VMs on data stores and this gives a lack of granular control for passing storage …

To achieve good performance for a virtualized workload your Storage Area Network (SAN) should deliver high IOps with a predictable low latency. If you are using a good flash system where IOps (Input/Output Operations Per Second) effectively become an unlimited resource then latency will probably be your limiting …

While I worked with Agile as a software tester when the concept first came out in 2002 shortly afterwards I joined a new company in a new role in Infrastructure, IT operations if you will. My recollection of Agile is that it was not a process at all; rather, it’s a set of principles summarized by the Agile Manifesto. …