• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content

jdgreen.io

The personal blog of James Green

  • Home
  • Technology
    • Announcements
    • Industry
    • Reviews/Guides
    • Tech Field Day
    • Interviews
  • Health
    • Food
    • Biohacking
    • Fitness
  • Faith
  • Book Notes
    • Business Books
    • Faith Books
    • Health Books
    • Technology Books
  • About
  • Show Search
Hide Search

Announcements

Many Much Needed Changes

James Green · Jan 5, 2016 ·

Rolling into 2016, I am shaking up everything.

2015 was a great year for me and my family. I had some extremely fulfilling experiences, like:

  • The birth of my daughter (our first child)
  • Making more money on the side in a year than I did in my first salaried IT job
  • Working on some really interesting projects with really great people

But as great as it was, I’ve been itching to make a change in a number of ways. I’ve been looking to shake up my career, my online presence, and the way I do life in general. So, without further ado…

Goodbye VirtAdmin

I launched VirtAdmin.com a few years ago as a personal outlet – a place to stash my findings so I could refer back to them later. I had NO. CLUE. what was in store for me because I started that blog. It didn’t get huge and now I party with Bieber, and it didn’t get acquired by a huge media site and I’m writing this to you from a beach somewhere. However, I got countless opportunities thanks to relationships that little website helped me form. I would venture to say that running virtadmin.com is the best single decision I’ve made for my career to date, and at the time I virtadmin-logostarted it, I could never have guessed that. I’m really not wise enough to have seen that; I got lucky.

At the time I launched the site, Virt(ualization) Admin(istrator) was a reasonably accurate description of the sort of thing I was into, and accurately reflected the content of the site. After half a decade, when the virtualization craze ended (you know it has ended, right?) I found myself in a pickle. I built a brand around a technology that, although it is integral to the data center, is not that hot and interesting anymore. I can’t pivot, because you can’t go writing about gardening on virtadmin.com. It just doesn’t make sense.

I want the freedom to write about whatever I want to write about. I’m well aware that the cardinal sin of successful blogging is to have too broad of a focus. Fortunately, for reasons you’ll understand soon, I no longer need to blog “successfully.” I’m going to blog because I want to. So VirtAdmin is being decommissioned, and my blog is moving to jdgreen.io. I plan to continue writing about all the technology things that interest me, just as I always have. But I also plan to write about other things that interest me in life, like nutrition, biology, and faith.

I’m taking the lead on this one from my friend Stephen Foskett, who uses his blog to write about whatever the heck he wants, and he doesn’t care who reads it. Because of that, the content is better, and more true to who he is. That’s what I want – content that is true to who I am. He also doesn’t monitor metrics on the site, because that might influence his behavior. I like that position, so I don’t plan to have any clue who reads this blog, or how much traffic I get from a given post.

Now, writing content about technology is very important to me. So I wouldn’t just be ditching my platform if I didn’t have an alternative. But oh, do I have an alternative!

Hello ActualTech Media

I’ve got to be honest; I’m a terrible employee. Not in the sense you may be thinking, like the kind who shows up late, watches Netflix while pretending to do work, and doesn’t make more coffee after they polish off the pot. I’m a terrible employee in the sense that employees fit into boxes (better known as “job descriptions”). And everywhere I’ve ever worked, despite my best efforts to contribute outside the proverbial box, I’ve been shut down. By trade, I’ve always a Smarty Geek. I turn knobs, and build stuff. And my job description from HR matches that role.

The problem is that I find business leadership extremely interesting. And when I get passionate about something, I want to sell it. Social media, marketing, and analytics really intrigue me. As an employee, I can’t contribute towards these objectives while still primarily being a Geek. If I wanted to market, for example, I’d have to quit my job and get a new one as a marketer, or transfer to the marketing department.

This problem is exactly why I decided that in 2016, it was time for me to take on a new challenge that is boundless. I’ve been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to partner up with the fantastic people at ActualTech Media – names you may know, like Scott D. ActualTechLowe (@otherscottlowe), David Davis (@davidmdavis), and Geordie Carswell (@geordiecarswell). They’ve built an amazing team over the last few years, and are delivering amazing results. Just take a look at what they accomplished in 2015!

I’ve been working with the ATM team on a contract basis for almost a year now, and it’s been nothing short of awesome. And joining them as my full-time pursuit by partnering together will allow me to escape the employee box. I know I can’t be all things to all people, and I’ll be the first to highlight my weaknesses. But I’m extremely excited to be able to use any and every skill set I possess to move a company forward. Regardless of whether I came or not, 2016 was going to be a huge year for ATM. But since I decided to come along for the ride, I can’t wait to be a part of that.

I did a neat little interview for the announcement on the ActualTech Media website. If you’re curious to know more about why I made the move, that interview can be found here.

Other Things

I said I was shaking up everything. Two items isn’t everything, so here’s just a sampling of other things I’m changing in 2016.

  • I’m disassembling my chair. I recently finished reading Get Up!: Why Your Chair is Killing You and What You Can Do About It and I am now terrified of my chair. I already have a motorized standing desk and have been moving back and forth between standing and sitting. In 2016, I’m going to break it so that it’s stuck in Up position.
  • I’m going to spend money on food like it’s fueling my health and performance. I’ve become really passionate over the last year about how nutrition affects performance. By learning about food, biology, and how what I’m putting in my body affects me, I’ve been able to lose almost 40 pounds and kick way more butt. It’s also so exciting that I really enjoy sharing. No one wants unsolicited advice about their health and nutrition, so I don’t generally bring it up. But if this interests you, let’s talk! I’ll share the simple, no-gimmick changes that I made that have me feeling awesome and performing my best.
  • My family is moving to Wisconsin. We’ve been living in my hometown of Des Moines, Iowa, but after having our first kid, my wife is desperate to be back by her family near the Milwaukee area. I’m game for a little adventure, so by summer time we’ll be relocating. Who is in the Milwaukee or Madison area that I need to meet up with? We’ll be living right between the two. I would love and be extremely grateful for any introductions or connections in the area, as I’m not going to know anyone.
  • I’m going to spend as much time as possible with my family. I spent the last half of 2015 working A LOT due to a regular job and a bunch of side work at the same time. That was for a quantified, agreed upon burst of time, and now that it’s over, I’m looking forward to re-introducing myself to my wife and daughter. We’re going to have a lot of fun in 2016!

I need to cut this off, but in short, thanks everyone for everything. If you’re reading this, you mean a lot to me, and I appreciate you being with me on this journey.

My 3 Big VMworld Goals from 2014

James Green · Aug 29, 2015 ·

Last year at VMworld 2014, I had some fantastic experiences and met heaps of great people (some of them are the kind of people who talk funny and use words like ‘heaps!’). I found myself challenged by certain conversations, and motivated, inspired, and excited by others. During the course of the show last year, at some specific point and more or less unintentionally, I found myself setting some goals based on what I was observing and hearing. I said to myself – “By this time next year, I will accomplish X, Y, and Z.” This post may be my first non-technical article on my blog, so I’m excited to break into that space and share two things: the three goals I set for myself and what my experience was in my pursuit of them.

Perhaps not surprisingly, these goals I set myself came about from things I realized in 1:1 conversation, or in a 1:few setting. Large groups are so fun, but I also love the depth that an intimate conversation setting can facilitate. I spent the day of registration wandering around with my friends Eric Wright and Angelo Luciani, and Eric and I were in the same hotel a 20 minute walk from the conference center, so we walked alone back to the hotel a time or two. They had no idea about this, and the only thing I’ve ever said about it was a hint I dropped a moonth or two ago. But it was with them that either a conversation or an experience caused me to set each one of these three goals. I’m on a plane now headed to VMworld 2015 and I’m so excited to land at SFO and wander around downtown San Francisco with those guys (and others) again, and who knows – maybe set some goals for next year! So, about the goals…

[Read more…] about My 3 Big VMworld Goals from 2014

#VFD5 in Boston – PernixData

James Green · Jun 24, 2015 ·

Ah, the belle of Tech Field Day… That may or may not be an exaggeration, but either way the Tech Field Day community LOVES PernixData. They show up and talk about the innovative and awesome technology they’re building. Also, Satyam is a hoot! At previous Tech Field Day Events, PernixData revealed FVP for the first time, and then announced FVP 2.0 at a later TFD. They’re not letting off the gas, because today at VFD5, Satyam announced PernixData Architect! This tool will analyze and understand an environment to provide insight and advice at a ‘meta’ level.

PernixData Architect

An example that Satyam gave during the presentation could be paraphrased like this: “When you ask Siri whether you need a raincoat, Siri associates the raincoat with rain and shows you the weather. In the infrastructure, traditional monitoring/planning/design tools will show you ‘If you pull a network cable, the link will be down.’ when what would be helpful is ‘If you pull a network cable, the link to the SAN will be down, causing datastore A, B, and C to be unavailable.” The ability of the tool to understand the impact of events and/or design decisions on the environment is monumental.

Satyam shared with the audience 3 design principles that guided the development of PernixData architect. The product that came to be is a result of these three considerations:

  • Get a lot of data (your own data). The data that someone else collects may not be useful to you, and it’s possible that no one else is collecting the type of data you need.
  • Control the user experience. Ensure that the UI is streamlined, and the dashboard shows extremely distilled, helpful information.
  • Make recommendations based on the application. A VM performing poorly doesn’t necessarily mean there’s an infrastructure performance problem. Perhaps the application isn’t doing what it should be, or was spec’ed to do?

The tool will show a characteristic IO “fingerprint” of a VM, including precise information about the size and frequency of IOs. This is as compared to most tools that would show an average of IO operations. For planning purposes, these two numbers are wildly different, the former obviously being much more helpful. It also shows the “working set” for each VM in the data center. Meaning the “hot” data for that VM is highlighted, which can help calculate the need for cache, higher tiers of storage, etc. At this point the tool focuses on storage only. That’s not an issue, as the product has to ship some time. Network, compute, etc will come later.

As exciting as all of this is, that was only one of the announcements!

[Read more…] about #VFD5 in Boston – PernixData

Monday Morning Highlights from #VMworld2014

James Green · Aug 25, 2014 ·

As VMworld 2014 kicks off, we set the tone for the whole conference. Most of the announcements that will be made are expected, but we’ll get to find out just how awesome they are. Also, maybe we’ll have a surprise or two! I’m live-blogging from the bloggers table in the Hang Space. If you’re at VMworld, stop by and say hello!

This morning, the following announcements bubbled up to the top of the list of highlights. These are exciting, to be sure!

 
EVO:RAIL

EVO-RAIL-LOGOEVO:RAIL combines VMware compute, networking, and storage resources into a hyper-converged infrastructure appliance to create a simple, easy to deploy, all-in-one solution offered by our partners.

So VMware has decided to enter the hyper-converged game. This does not fall into the “surprise” category. With the introduction of VSAN and NSX, it looked a lot like VMware was leading up to this. I wonder what this means for Nutanix and Simplivity. They both have their own unique value add, but won’t customers be more comfortable sticking with vendors they’re familiar and comfortable with? To that end, Simplivity also has a big announcement around OmniStack in partnership with Cisco. More on that in another post.

VMware has never been in the hardware game, and I don’t think they will be. This will be OEM hardware from partners like Dell, EMC, Supermicro, etc.The building block is a 2U box that can include 4 nodes. One can stack 4 of these boxes for a total of 16 nodes – half of the current vSphere cluster size limit. EVO:RACK is currently being tested at VMware, and when this goes public it will allow for larger scale deployments.

EVO-nodes
2U, 4 node building block

There is an area in the Solutions Exchange showcasing EVO gear and doing demos. Be sure to stop by there and check it out if you’ve got some time!

vRealize Suite

At VMworld 2014 today, the Cloud Management team introduced the VMware vRealize Suite, a Cloud Management Platform. The need for a comprehensive Cloud Management Platform (CMP) arose from the convergence of multiple management disciplines employed by new models of developing, deploying, and managing applications. Essentially, CMP enables robust application and infrastructure delivery while managing to a set of polices in the most cost-efficient manner.

The vRealize suite provides an efficient way to manage a hybrid cloud. vRealize will swallow up vCAC and vCOps and ITBM. It will also contain two new things:

  • vRealize Air Automation – vCloud Automation Center offered as SaaS
  • vRealize Operations Insight – a new version of Log Insight

There is also a private beta program you can apply to be a part of! Register for the beta program here.

VMware Integrated OpenStack

VMware Integrated OpenStack (Beta) is a VMware-supported OpenStack distribution that makes it easy for IT to run an enterprise-grade OpenStack on top of their existing VMware infrastructure.

There’s no getting away from OpenStack – VMware administrators who aren’t already proficient with OpenStack should start working on it now. If you need ramp up material, I’d highly recommend Eric Wright‘s Pluralsight course Introduction to Openstack.

Because it is becoming so prevalent, enabling VMware customers to quickly and easily use OpenStack is a high priority for VMware. To address this, they’ve introduced VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO). This is distributed as an OVA and it deploys a vApp containing all the components of an OpenStack deployment. This seems like a more mature iteration of VOVA. Once deployed, you will have access directly from the vSphere Web Client!

VIO
Image credit to @chriswahl – www.wahlnetwork.com

Thoughts

This is sure to be an exciting week, and I’m sure there’s many more new developments to research and discuss. Of the announcements so far, I’m most excited about EVO. Between EVO and Simplivity’s announcement about UCS, I see customers being a lot more interested and willing to get into the hyper-converged game. This afternoon will involve some Tech Field Day action, so be sure to tune in for that. I’ll be bumming around the Hang Space most of the day, and maybe pop over to the Solutions Exchange to pick up some vExpert gifts later on. See you around!

DataGravity – First Look

James Green · Aug 19, 2014 ·

Perhaps you’ve heard of DataGravity (@DataGravityInc), or perhaps you haven’t. They’ve been staying pretty quiet about what they’ve been working on. Today, however, they’re dropping the veil. Read on for a look into what you can expect from this exciting announcement!

Disclosure: I did not receive any compensation or benefit from DataGravity Inc. for writing this post. The product is purely awesome and excited me 🙂

Data-Aware Storage

What DataGravity has announced today with their Discovery Series is a storage array that is introspective and knows about the data being stored to a level that I’ve never seen before. Imagine if you could ask your array, “Who has accessed this file? How often? How old is it? Can you grab me a previous version of that?” This product does many things that we already have the ability to do with other tools; the difference between DataGravity and other like-tools is that this tool is providing you data about itself. Other tools look at your data and try to collect as much information as possible. This array has enough inherent intelligence to look at all the data being written and accessed and give you copious amounts of meta-information, all in realtime and without impact to production.

How??

A question that has changed the data center dramatically in terms of compute is about to change the way we interact with data. “How can I make use of these idle resources?” In the compute realm, we realized we could run many virtual servers on one physical server to drive up utilization and reduce hardware spend (with resources that were previously being wasted). When the founders at DataGravity asked this question about storage, they realized that an Active/Passive array could utilize the resources on the passive node to collect and process information about the data that is already being mirrored to it! Let me reiterate that – a passive node already has a copy of all this data, and then it just sits there. So DataGravity decided to take all that idle power and turn it into insights and intelligence about your data! DataGravity_Presentation_August_pdf

 

The “Intelligence Node” chomps away on the secondary copy of your data while production IO hums happily along, none the wiser. This information is then digested and available for the business to use in as many ways as it can think of.

Put It To Work

So what are some of the ways DataGravity could help your business be more efficient, more secure, more intelligent? Here’s just a few:

  • DataGravity recognizes and indexes content from over 400 different file types. All this is then searchable, and you can perform action on it.
  • It identifies patterns within said file and can, for instance, alert you that a file contains PII like a Social Security Number. You can then contact the person who owns this document and ask them to remove the sensitive information.
  • It interfaces with AD/LDAP and file-level ACLs to give you information about who owns/uses/modifies any given file. A company could then generate reports or take action based on correlations drawn from this information.
  • Perform a file-level restore nearly instantly within a VM in a matter of clicks

Learn More

VMworld is coming up in a matter of days, and you can be sure that DataGravity will be there. You can find them at booth #1647 and if you have the time, you should be sure to stop by and have a chat with them. Also be sure to Follow them on Twitter and check out www.datagravity.com!

Write-ups by my friends:

  • Why Is DataGravity Such A Big Deal? – Stephen Foskett (@sfoskett)
  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Go to Next Page »

Copyright © 2023 · Monochrome Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

Posting....