Recently-Added

Not everyone who encrypts data uses a key management solution. Since the days we started worrying about storage of personally identifiable information (PII) we’ve had different methods of protecting it. In a small environment, simple PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) keys were used to manually encrypt data and decrypt it. Storing keys for a few different partners that you routinely exchange data with was simple enough to do. But what about today when we’re storing sensitive data in databases, on storage volumes and in other people’s data centers, like Amazon Web Services. How do we manage numerous keys and make sure that those keys are properly maintained? ...

It’s one of those “first world problems” where you have either not enough wireless coverage at home, or you’re getting too much interference from the neighbors to have satisfactory wireless coverage. I had an Linksys AC3200 providing all of my house’s wireless connectivity and for the most part, it did a good job. I have about twenty-five devices connected to it through wireless and all four of the 1Gbps network jacks filled up as well. Occasionally I found that I needed to restart the router but it was pretty good, no real complaints. However I did have it located in my office which is at the opposite side of my house from my bedroom, which meant some sketchy wireless over the 5Ghz band if working from bed which I did often. I’d have to switch over to the 2.4GHz band and then I was getting interference from neighbors. It was time to try something else. OK sure, I could’ve moved the router closer to the middle of the house, but let’s over engineer the solution instead right? ...

My father was an electrician for over thirty years and has worked on houses, power plants, and manufacturing facilities for most of his life. When travelling around the region near the small town where I grew up, you can see physical structures that my Dad has helped to construct. There must be a certain sense of pride to see something that you built thirty years ago still standing and still being used today. ...

Many of you read my previous post about leaders being removed from VMUG for working for vendors that compete with VMware. My call to action was to get a response from VMUG about what was actually happening. I recently received a phone call from VMUG CEO Brad Tompkins to discuss what was actually happening and I’d like to pass on some information to clear the air. VMUG Leader Status To get started, yes some leaders were removed from leadership roles in their respective VMUG. And yes, some people will not be allowed to become a VMUG leader based on which company is their employer. What I would like to make clear is that this decision was not made to single out Nutanix. Most of the comments that I saw on twitter were focused on Nutanix employees who had been removed from their local VMUGs. While it’s true that Nutanix is one of these companies, they are not the only one so I want to make it clear that this was not directed solely at Nutanix. This was a decision focused on companies that compete directly with VMware’s products and comes down to a decision about business and competition. ...

At this point I assume everyone is tired of hearing about storage arrays. They seem to have saturated the market to the point where the new storage companies have all but evaporated, or got bought by a larger company. Couple that with a focus on moving to public clouds and the storage array seems to have been beaten to death. While I was at Tech Field Day 12 I had the opportunity to see the folks over at StorageOS present on their fancy new storage solution. I was fully prepared to be lulled to sleep with another storage device but StorageOS had an interesting new take on the storage array. Their solution is to use containers to provide a global namespace to a clustered file system. Having a lightweight 40MB container acting as a controller for your virtual storage array could be an interesting topic all by itself. Off of the top of my head the use cases would include: ...

VMware Users Group (VMUG) has been an important part of my career and an institution that has been close to my heart for many years. I’ve written about my experiences before and served as a leader for several years here in Chicago. Thats why there was some concern when I saw this tweet from Anton Zhbankov last week. Now, at first this didn’t surprise me too much because there has been a rule that each VMUG chapter is supposed to comprise of more customers than partners as leaders. So, naturally I assumed that this was just fixing an imbalanced VMUG chapter. But as I asked more questions found out that it really was because Anton worked for Nutanix and working at this specific company excludes you from being a VMUG leader. Fellow blogger Matt Crape also wrote a post about this on his site. So now this tweet that had me concerned, has just simply made me sad. ...

Another year has come and gone. The aspirations that we had for our past trip around the sun have been extinguished and a new set of goals wrapped in confident optimism are on our horizons. For many, the end of the year is used to recharge and take a break from work to celebrate with our families. Now with rejuvenated ambition we can set our backlog of objectives for a new year’s worth of challenges. This post attempts to relate some agile principles used for work in your everyday struggle to meet the new year’s goals. ...

If you follow me on twitter, you’ve probably seen a little bit of back and forth between myself and a Seattle fellow named Jason Langer. Jason and I have known each other for several years now over social media channels due to our similar interests in VMware technologies. I usually run into Jason only once a year at VMworld, but it’s one of these situations where I feel like we chat often enough just because of twitter conversations. ...

A recent vendor product briefing during Tech Field Day 12 got me thinking about the term “pay-as-you-go”. In my line of work, I talk about public cloud a decent amount and maybe I take pay-as-you-go for granted. When I think about this term it means that as soon as I’m done with a resource, I can destroy it and no longer have to pay for it anymore. It also means that I can scale when I need to and just start paying for the new resources as I start consuming them. ...

I was pretty unsure of the value proposition from DriveScale in the weeks preceding Tech Field Day 12. Maybe the reason is because I’m not a Hadoop expert by any means. They have a pretty interesting idea though, so I wanted to make sure others were clear about what their solution was capable of. In a virtualized world, we’re pretty familiar with decoupling disks from our storage. It’s done via storage arrays that present iSCSI, Fibre Channel, NFS or whatever. Once we’ve presented a pool of disks to our hypervisor, we can carve up small virtual disks to be used with our virtual machines. In a Hadoop world, we want to have direct access to our drives so that HDFS can manage the storage. For this, we usually have rack mounted pizza box type servers with a certain amount of storage in them and then we can add multiples of them to form a cluster. DriveScale wanted to give HDFS some extra flexibility by allowing a pool of disks to be added, or removed to our servers. ...