EMCworld Announcements

There were quite a number of interesting announcements at EMCworld this year. The most important is that the Dell-EMC merger is on track to complete its reorganization as Dell Technologies. Dell Technologies will join the ranks of the largest hardware and software vendors worldwide. EMC also announced several new hardware options and software services, and …

The New OpenStack: Collaboration

At this year’s OpenStack Summit in Austin, Texas, the message was clear. OpenStack needs to pivot from a science experiment to a production system. Even though this is happening, it has been happening slowly. Some would argue that it has been achieved for the likes of PayPal and other extremely large institutions, such as AT&T. However, running, configuring, and …

A Look at Automation Tools of the Trade

A look at automation tools of the trade. In my last post, I spent a little time talking about the difference between automation, which is the automated task or scripted solution to perform a task, and orchestration, which is the complete process and then top it all off with how DevOps is a philosophy behind the orchestration. For this post I want to focus in on the some of the most common tools of the trade behind the automation and orchestration for the different types of environments.

Cost to Build a New Virtualized Data Center, Part 2b

In part one of Cost to Build a New Virtualized Data Center, we discussed the basic software costs for a virtualized data center based on VMware vSphere 6.0, Citrix XenServer 6.5, Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 R2 and 2016, and Red Hat. If you missed that, please click here to review before continuing.

Stop Focusing on DevOps and Start Focusing on Delivering Business Outcomes

I have seen far too many definitions of the term DevOps. Everyone, including myself, has their own definition. Worse, I have seen even more interpretations of what “doing DevOps” means within enterprises. Here are a few examples of what some people think DevOps is: Automating infrastructure Building out CI/CD pipelines Writing Chef scripts Creating a new …

Container as a Service?

Every day, IT professionals live and breathe applications, yet our focus for operational tools is a single container, virtual machine, database, etc. How do these items map to the application in use? Even the monolithic-looking applications of yesterday were actually made up of services. Those services will be reborn as microservices within the applications of …