So I apologize (again) for not posting much, and not replying to comments recently.
I suppose it’s obvious I haven’t posted in a long time. I have mentioned this many times before but there really isn’t much in tech that has gotten me excited in probably the past two years. I see new things and am just not interested anymore for whatever reason.
I have been spending some time with the 3PAR 7450 that I got late last year that is a pretty cool box but at the end of the day it’s the same 3PAR I’ve known for the past 8 years just with SSDs and dedupe (which is what I wanted, I needed something I felt I could rely on for the business I work for, I have become very conservative when it comes to storage over the years).
That and there’s been a lot of cool stuff going on with me outside of tech so I am mostly excited about that and have been even less focused on tech recently.
I pushed myself harder than I thought possible for more than a decade striving to be the best that I could be in the industry and think I accomplished a lot (at one point last year a former boss of mine said they hired 9 people to do my job after I left that particular company. Other positions are/were similar, perhaps not as extreme.)
I am now pushing myself harder than I ever thought possible in basically everything BUT tech, in part to attempt to make up for sacrifices made over the previous decade. So I am learning new things, just not as much in technology and I don’t know how long this journey will take.
I can’t put into words how excited I am.
Tech interesting areas I have spent some time on in recent months that may get a blog post at some point include:
- LogicMonitor – the most advanced/easy to use dashboarding/graphing system I’ve ever come across. It does more than dashboards and graphs but to-date that is all I’ve used it for and it pays for itself 5x over with that alone for me. I’ve spent a bunch of time porting my custom monitors over to it including collecting more than 12,000 data points/minute from my 3PAR systems! I can’t say enough good things about this platform from the dashboard/graphing standpoint(since that is all I use it for right now)
- ScaleArc – Sophisticated database availability tool. For me using it for MySQL though they support other DBs as well. Still in the very early stages of deployment.
- HP StoreOnce – not sure I have much to write about this, since I only use it as a NAS, all of the logic is in my own scripts. But getting 33.6:1 reduction in data on 44TB of written user data is pretty sweet for me, beats the HELL out of the ZFS system I was using for this before(maybe 5:1 reduction with ZFS).
So, this may be the last blog post for a while(or forever) I am not sure, for anyone out there still watching, thanks for reading over the years, thanks for the comments, and wish you the best!
I am glad to hear you are unplugging Nate, go have some fun. I think we can all say you have earned it.
Cheers
D
Comment by D — March 6, 2015 @ 2:58 pm
Hey D!!
Dude as someone who has known me for what 11 or 12 years maybe more now that really means a lot to me thank you very much!!
nate
(I’ll buy drinks next time I’m in SEA if your up for some..!!)
Comment by Nate — March 6, 2015 @ 3:26 pm
Even Vsphere 6.0 with 3PAR and VVOLS don’t make you excited? 😛
Comment by _m — March 19, 2015 @ 7:13 am
It’s a little bit exciting, I think it is good tech, I just don’t see myself upgrading to vSphere 6 anytime soon. I *just* completed upgrading from 4.1 to 5.5 a few weeks ago. VVOLs don’t really give me anything extra that I need right now. One pain point that it would probably address is easier metrics for storage on a per-VM basis(vCenter just doesn’t cut it for anything serious), but for the most part I have that now with LogicMonitor(deployed it in August 2014). I have graphs where I can see info on a per VM basis, or see top 10 VMs for anything that I can put in a regex(around the VM host names, and we have a good naming scheme), or on a per vCenter, or even global basis.
I very rarely take VM-level snapshots (only when testing new things which is pretty rare), I asked HP and they said(at the time) they believed the initial version of VVOLs won’t support things like taking a snapshot of a VM and presenting that snapshot to another VM for use (I do this quite often with 3PAR-level snapshots for databases).
I don’t use array-based replication, I don’t require QoS, I don’t really need any of the policies that make VVOLs more useful. Some things would be nice to have, but nothing makes me jump out of my seat and say I MUST HAVE THIS NOW (for my current workloads). From a vSphere perspective actually nothing has made me say that since vSphere 4.0 (hence why it’s almost a year past vSphere 4.1’s end of support that I finally upgraded to 5.5). I looked at the new features of 5.0, 5.1, 5.5 and even 6.0. Some nice to have things, but nothing groundbreaking for my use cases.
I value stability and maturity above all else right now, and vSphere 6 is still far too new to meet the bar for me (and doesn’t provide anything that would entice me to risk stability in order to use it). vSphere 4.1 was so rock solid for me for so many years it was a tough decision to upgrade to 5 (and 5.5.x was a little rocky at first though the issues encountered haven’t shown themselves in a while hopefully they’re gone as quickly as they came).
Maybe I’m just getting old I don’t know.
Comment by Nate — March 19, 2015 @ 7:33 am