Demitasse

This is a preparation blog post before I travel to Boston for Tech Field Day 11. You can find more information about Tech Field Day, the other presenters, and the other delegates here on the TFD website.

Disclosure: TFD are paying my airfare and accommodation to attend TFD11. I’m sure there will be gifts and catering from the presenters and TFD while we’re there. Everything I write about what I learn at TFD will be my opinion and will not be reviewed by TFD or the presenters. There is also no obligation or expectation that I will write about any or all of the presenters.

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This is a preparation blog post before I travel to Boston for Tech Field Day 11. You can find more information about Tech Field Day, the other presenters, and the other delegates here on the TFD website.

Disclosure: TFD are paying my airfare and accommodation to attend TFD11. I’m sure there will be gifts and catering from the presenters and TFD while we’re there. Everything I write about what I learn at TFD will be my opinion and will not be reviewed by TFD or the presenters. There is also no obligation or expectation that I will write about any or all of the presenters.

Continue reading →

This is a preparation blog post before I travel to Boston for Tech Field Day 11. You can find more information about Tech Field Day, the other presenters, and the other delegates here on the TFD website.

Disclosure: TFD are paying my airfare and accommodation to attend TFD11. I’m sure there will be gifts and catering from the presenters and TFD while we’re there. Everything I write about what I learn at TFD will be my opinion and will not be reviewed by TFD or the presenters. There is also no obligation or expectation that I will write about any or all of the presenters.

Continue reading →

Recently I spent a little over a week taking part in the VMUG user conferences, Sydney, Melbourne, and Singapore. I spent some of my time reflecting on the role of commercial organizations in community. There is a fairly well known issue with VMUG, most presenters are vendors and a lot of the time the presentations aren’t great. Often people attend VMUG more to talk to the other attendees or attend the community presentations. With a change of emphasis, I think vendor presentations can deliver more value to the VMUG attendees and to the sponsors.

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My work has changed a lot over the last couple of years. I am no longer in front of a class teaching courses that are provided to me. Since 2015, my main work is writing, producing blog posts, analytical articles and training materials. I end up writing thousands of word per week and thought I’d share a little about my process.

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A little while ago I wrote about Datto and their cloud-enabled backup system. I said at the time that I was interested in trying out the solution in my lab. I was fortunate enough to be sent a unit to trial and have been playing around with the product.

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If you spend enough time traveling, you get to see some amazing things. Unfortunately, you also get to miss some amazing things.

Next month is the first Asia Pacific Podcast Conference in Auckland. The conference is aimed at serious podcasters who want to make a career out of podcast creation. Speakers include internationally successful podcasters, as well as professional communications professionals who include podcasting in a portfolio of media production. The agenda is two days of a single stream, so you will be able to attend every session.

The conference is coordinated by Paul Spain, host of the NZ Tech Podcast and all round good guy. I’ve been a guest on that podcast a few times and my wife recognized him talking gadgets on TV3. I’m a little sad that I won’t be able to attend the conference as I will be on a plane to a podcast inspired adventure in Berlin.

If you want to find out how to make podcasting into a career or to use podcasting to extend your media and communications career then I’d suggest you get to Auckland for the Asia Pacific Podcast Conference. If you come to the conference from overseas, make sure to book an extra week or two to see some of New Zealand.

This weekend I started my first log haul trip of the year. A week in Boston with SimpliVity and the VTUG Winter Warmer. As you probably know, travel allows lots of idle time to think. One of the things I have been thinking about is how changing time zones changes how we describe things. Not the usual jet lag and sleep deprivation, but the results of crossing the dateline.

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I haven’t mentioned my other site, Notes4Engineers for quite a while. Partly because I haven’t posted anything there for nearly a year. I have a few videos that I made with SimpliVity that cover some of teh ways that hardware failure can affect a SimpliVity cluster. This first video covers how SSD and HDD failure affects a cluster.

You can find this video here on Notes4Engineers.

<SpoilerAlert> The use of hardware RAID means that there is no outage even with multiple concurrent failures</SpoilerAlert>

I’ve written quite a bit about deduplicated storage for VMs over the last few months. It’s almost the only thing I’ve written about here. So far I have mostly talked in general about dedupe and its impact on VM storage. Now I want to share something I recently found out about SimpliVity’s deduplicated VM storage. It is fundamental to how SimpliVity gets operational efficiency from their data efficiency.

Disclaimer: While I am regularly doing paid work for SimpliVity, they have not requested or reviewed this article.

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