Is Automation Killing The Engineering?

Is automation killing the engineering? When MTV first appeared on air, the first video it played was, “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Fast forward a few decades and I have to wonder if automation is killing the engineering. In the early days of virtualization the administrators were expected to be proficient via the command line and to be honest if you wanted to really understand how things worked, command line administration was an absolute must have skill. Virtualization has evolved from those early days with more and more features and services getting added to the infrastructure that the need for the vast command line skills seem to be fading as the technology continues to mature. Looking forward where cloud computing is working to achieve complete and total automation, I have to wonder how administrators will handle the stress of getting issues resolved when automation is not an option.

Can you Pivot to Pivotal?

At EMCworld 2013, one of the big stories was Pivotal and it’s importance to the EMC2 family and the future of computing. Pivotal is geared to provide the next generation of computing. According to EMC2 have gone past the Client-Server style to a scale-out, scale-up, big data, fast data Internet of Things form of computing. The real question however, is how can we move traditional business critical applications to this new model, or should we? Is there migration path one can take?

What is the Future of Virtual Storage in a Software Defined Data Center?

What is the future of virtual storage in a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)? As more and more technology gets moved from hardware to software in the SDDC, I have to wonder which direction virtual storage will go.

If we use networking as an example, the technology has evolved from setting up local virtual switches on each of the hosts to a virtual distributed switch (VDS) model where all the individual host-level virtual switches are abstracted into a single large VDS that spans multiple hosts at the Datacenter level. In this design, the data plane remains local to each VDS, but the management plane is centralized with VMware vCenter Server acting as the control point for all configured VDS instances.

Can Microsoft succeed as a DaaS provider with Mohoro?

The recent rumors of Microsoft working on a hosted virtual desktop (DaaS) solution to add to their cloud services offering may actually end up being one of the most viable options for organizations who already rely heavily on Microsoft infrastructure to run their business. Having all of your core services being delivered from a single location and provider could ease the operational concerns of some who find running a hybrid of on-premise and hosted solutions still requiring the same amount of operational support.