NetApp Engineer

I’m very honoured and grateful to have been asked recently by Lisa Crewe from NetApp to put together a guest blog post on her NetApp blog. The first of these has gone live this afternoon, covering some of the fundamentals to “What is the Cloud”. I was quite keen to not talk specific products or solutions, but more the softer aspects of what you need to consider in order to start planning towards your own Cloud offering.

http://blogs.netapp.com/crewe_oncommand/2011/05/guest-post-what-is-the-cloud.html

We had a very good VMware User Group last month and I met some great guys. After my session on Tier-1 virtualisation, I had a good chat with Microsoft SQL expert, Andrew Fryer. He invited me to do a guest blog post on TechNet covering some of the detail I covered on SQL in my session. I’ve finally had the chance to put this together and he has very kindly posted this as a guest article on his TechNet blog.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/andrew/archive/2011/05/18/virtualising-sql-server-a-second-opinion.aspx

This year I have boldly put forward for a couple of sessions at VMworld. I’d love the opportunity to share some of my thoughts, knowledge and experience with a wider audience, so please feel free to put a vote forward towards me! I’ll be covering off 3 different topics…

2621 The Secret to a Successful Cloud – People!

This covers a bit more detail in Cloud architectures. Everyone can now give you the dictionary term for what a “Cloud” is, but I still think very few people are helping you translate that into how to actual put together your own Cloud. It isn’t about software, or services, it’s about people and procedures. You can have a fully functional Cloud environment very easily if you sit down and work out what you want to achieve and what processes/procedures need to be put in place. I’ll be talking a little about frameworks and continual service improvement models as well as IT maturity. The key takeaway is that you and your colleagues are the key to you successfully deploying a Cloud infrastructure!

2141 Future vAdmins

This follows on from a successful topic I covered at the last Northern UK VMUG which covered some of the skills required to be a successful vAdmin and where the industry is taking us. It’s been easy to get by in IT over the past 5-10 years with a small subset of skills, but with virtualisation you need a much wider remit. As a VCDX I know this all too well!!! I’ll cover some key industry certifications, how this can benefit your employer, and some key complimentary areas such as soft skills (which I think are hugely important).

2142 Questions to Ask Your Design Authority  Read more... (1018 words, estimated 4:04 mins reading time)