Posts by CrustyDanBear

Missing the point

I spoke to a Microsoft bod at Cloud Foundry Summit a few weeks back; he told me that this Linux on Win10 is just to provide useful Linux tools for techies to make Win10 a more potent tool compared to macOS. I had also been to OpenStack Summit earlier this year, and I'd say that 85% of laptops were MacBook Pros at these open source gatherings. I'm sure Microsoft would prefer them all to be Win10 machines.

I was also surprised to hear that 1/3 of their Azure estate is running bare metal Linux, and they have a complete solution based on Cloud Foundry. He did a CF on Azure demo on his MacBook Pro, for a laugh, he did a CF Push from an app on his iPhone.

Microsoft isn't the same company it was under Balmer and Gates.

Incompetence

So will the IT bod who designed the security around this system be struck off the register of IT professionals or simply skulk off onto the next project. Oh, wait.

Sitting here at OpenStack Summit, talking to a lot of banks and telco's investing big $$$ into the private cloud. Sure, Google and AWS are infrastructure models to emulate, not migrate. Cloud automation is rocket science, techies working in SDDC are more secure and better paid than ever.

Dell|EMC are capitalising on this private/hybrid cloud need, not chasing the SME's but the giant beasts which keep our world running. There will always be a need for public, private and hybrid clouds, to think otherwise misunderstands what cloud computing offers large enterprises.

This obviously doesn't take into account all the HA/DR solutions as well as the complexity of managing a proper high end array like a VMAX. Storage performance is also another aspect which cannot be conveniently scripted away.

Perhaps at the low/middle end of the storage market, a SysAdmin can get away with provisioning a few LUNs due to disk pooling taking away some of the thought which used to go into provisioning, but this has been the case for several years now and is not new news.

The future is storage virtualisation. But thats another 5-10 years away from completely transforming the market. Will we still need storage admins? I think you'll need to check how complicated SDS solutions are compared to disk arrays today, you'll need to know about the Linux OS, clustering, different data protection methods, metadata manipulation and a bit of scripting to boot as well as all the networking/pooling/performance skills you need today. Check out CERN's implementation of Ceph in a ~30PB cluster for a giggle at people who think data storage wont be a specialist job especially at 'Big Data' scale.

Training hard to get?

In the past 9 years I've had the following:

Employer 1 (6 Years) - 8 Microsoft courses, 3 Cisco courses, 2 CheckPoint courses, 1 ITIL course

Employer 2 (1 Year) - No courses - Hence I left

Employer 3 (2 Years so far) - 4 VMWare courses, 1 Microsoft course

I've also had the exam's paid for too and have ITIL, MCSE, MCITP and VCP certifications.

Training can be pretty good if you get the right employer!