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.

Hyperconvergence and OS

In the good old days (rose-tinted spectacles required), there was only one operating system in the stack. It took care of device drivers and file IO. There were many flavours of OS, depending on the period, from UNIX and Windows to OS/2 and MacOS, and many, many others. Over time, the selection of operating systems in the data center reduced …

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 …

Automation, Orchestration, and DevOps in Today’s Data Center

Automation and orchestration are two of the terms that you hear about more and more especially when discussing virtualization and or cloud computing. One of the main reason for that is as virtualization and cloud computing technology continues to mature, so has the automation and the orchestration that are such an intricate part of the solutions presented forth from this technology and as such there are more and more products and services that are built around automation and orchestration itself. For this post, I want to focus more on the underlying technology before I get more into the different products themselves. This may be most interesting for anyone that is looking to expand their skillset to be able to compete and excel in a technology world that is traveling full speed up into the clouds.

Cloud for All

Building and operating a private cloud is a complex undertaking. Most cloud platforms are designed to play well with thousands of physical servers. This is great for public cloud providers and extremely large enterprise organizations. However, smaller organizations that need a cloud built from tens of physical servers can find these platforms challenging. I’ve written …