All flash storage arrays are all the rage. There are numerous relatively new entrants into the storage market seeking to upend the big player status quo. All of my customers are being approached and asking their own questions. They’re planning ahead and trying to decide if they should go all flash. “Can I afford it?” “Is spinning disk dead?” “Do they have all the features I want? “Will the vendor be here in three years?
“So what do you do?” So one of the most common questions I get from friends and family is “So what is it you do now?” Most of them know I changed jobs 6 months ago. That said, it was always rather hard to explain to non-technical friends what it is I actually did then. To some degree it’s easier to explain what I do now. My role is what is classically known as a “Sales Engineer” though at ASG our title is “Consulting Engineer” which is a reflection of our company direction.
Taken together, the operating system and BASIC gave you everything you needed to write and run your own little programs. But the computer contained no word processor, no bells and whistles, no array of applications waiting for you to play with them, no instant pleasurable pay-off for buying a new computer. When you turned on the Atom or the BBC Micro, the ROM chip booted up its two pieces of cargo and on your television screen appeared this:
It’s 2015, but you would think it was 1995 based on what we’re still using in our data centers for enterprise storage. We still have gobs and gobs of spinning disks, sucking power and boring us to death while they find our data. Convergence is largely unconverged—we still have separate Fibre Channel and IP data networks, and the only things that got converged were our bills of materials and the sides of our wallets.
This is all well and good, but how can I (as a non-programmer) use a tool like Git? Here are a couple examples: You can use a Git repository to store the documentation for an IT project or service. The repository’s commit history will reflect changes in the IT project or service over time. You can store configuration files in a Git repository. If a change to a configuration file produces adverse results, you can use the repository’s commit history to go back to a previous version of the file.
So it’s a new year and time to make a new start on ye olde blog site. I last refreshed my design and tools around 2006. So why change now? Well I was influenced by Scott Lowe’s migration post. A lot of what he had to say resonated with me. Back in July I changed my job role from a hands-on, live-down-in-the-weeds technologist running a fairly large complex portion of a customer environment to a consultancy role advising a variety of customers.