Support in the 21st Century. What Works? What Doesn’t?

Support in the 21st Century. What Works? What Doesn’t? In my last post, I laid out what I, in my humble opinion, would be the basic expectations or baseline expectations of just about most companies support model and structure would be like. In the past twenty years or so, these have been my observations and expectations any time that I started any new assignment in a new company. There was a certain level of comfort, which comes from experience, when starting a new position in a new company to at least have a basic understanding of what to expect. There is always a technical “learning curve” that comes with anything new, but makes the transition easier having a basic understanding of how thing will be supported. That concept has served me well over the years, but just like how virtualization and cloud computing has changed the datacenter landscape, I think the change in the support structure is just now really well on its way and now would be a good time to have a look at what works and what doesn’t.

The Future for Cloud Native Applications

Container technologies and developers work with applications. End users use applications. Yet, administrators think about the systems that make up the applications with tools that are not application-centric but rather system-, VM-, or container-focused. Because the tools are not focused on the application, the definition of the application is unknown by those who support the …

How Will Dell Blend Its SDN Story with Nicira/NSX?

The big story of the last few weeks has been Dell’s $67B acquisition of EMC, and with it, VMware. This is big news for the industry—news that will have ramifications all over the software-defined data centre. One of the most interesting implications is how Dell will reconcile its own SDN strategy with VMware’s NSX vision. Do the …

Support in the 21st Century Data Center

Support in the 21st Century Datacenter. There is no doubt that virtualization technology has been one of the leading factors in the dramatic changes we have seen inside the 21st century datacenters. For all practical purposes the landscape in the datacenters today look a lot different than they did before the turn of the century. During this evolution that fundamentally changed the technology environment, how much has the support structure really changed to keep up with virtualization and cloud technologies? This is the topic that I would like to focus on in this multi-part post that will explore the different support structures and concepts that have been the standards. Let’s start a discussion of what just might be a better way of doing things moving forward. First, I want to establish the base line and then move on to the different thought processes and philosophies for the future.