My thoughts on 2016. We are quickly coming up to the end of 2015 and this is the time that we, the analysts, like to make our predictions for what is in store in the upcoming year of 2016. First, let me start with one of the biggest announcements and surprises of 2015 which was the Dell acquisition of EMC. This acquisition is expected to close sometime in mid-2016 and I want to see the deal close before I shed all my skepticism that this deal will come to completion. I understand that it is pretty much a done deal, but nothing is truly finished until the final signature is added. So, keeping up with the status of this acquisition is one of the things at the top of my list of things to watch in 2016.
Stephen Beaver is the co-author of VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center and Scripting VMware Power Tools: Automating Virtual Infrastructure Administration as well as being contributing author of Mastering VMware vSphere 4 and How to Cheat at Configuring VMware ESX Server. Stephen is an IT Veteran with over 15 years experience in the industry. Stephen is a moderator on the VMware Communities Forum and was elected vExpert for 2009 and 2010. Stephen can also be seen regularly presenting on different topics at national and international virtualization conferences.
Bringing About Change
Bringing about change. One of the hardest things to bring about is change, and there is no place where that is truer than in the world of IT. When anything happens in the environment, the most common response from IT professionals is, “What changed?” That almost sounds like a Family Feud question, but I digress. …
Philosophies of Automation
Philosophical questions for automation; well, at least my humble opinion on the matter. In my opinion there are three main areas, or segments, that are established for automation in the modern day data centers. The first segment is provisioning, then second day operations and finally to complete the life-cycle management is the decommission process. Every data center is similar to each other, but yet what really makes things different is the choice of technologies that are used in the environment.
Tools of the 21st Century Data Centers
Tools of the 21st Century Data Centers. For this post, I wanted to continue with my thoughts on what helps make up 21st Century Data Centers. In my last post, I focused on the automation aspect of the modern day data center and since I brought it up, let me take another moment to express my main point from that post. There is no right or wrong answer when it comes to choosing which automation engine you will use in your environment. There are plenty of options available and you should make your decision based on which solution will make the most sense for your environment and the systems that are running on it. You should also take advantage of other automation tools or engines that may be provided as part of another solution. In my humble opinion, taking advantage of the native functionality that is vender provided is a gift that should be opened and taken advantage of.
Orchestration in the 21st Century Data Centers
Orchestration in the 21st Century Data Centers. Automation has evolved from its humble beginnings as a local basic scheduler to kick off scripts and tasks to enterprise level tool that is used in most if not all the different and unique silos that encompasses Corporate I.T. In this post, I am going to focus on some of the different kinds of automation engines that are is use. This post will not even begin to touch on all of the different products and solutions that are out there and I will definitely not even begin to say that there is any right way or tool but would like to go on record that, in my humble opinion, there is one main wrong answer with automation and that wrong answer would be to be completely dependent on any one solution or product itself.
Support in the 21st Century: Bringing About Change
Support in the 21st Century. Bringing About Change. In my first post of this series, I laid out my personal opinion, based on my experience, the baseline expectations for a corporate support model and structure established at most companies. This is where I first brought up technology silos and presented the correlation between the number of technology silos and the size of the infrastructure.