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A Sysadmin's Guide to Spaghetti Cabling: Bridging the Gap between IT Operations and Business
No, it’s not the latest culinary invention from a famous Italian chef: spaghetti cabling (a nice wording for cabling inferno) is a sour dish we’d rather not eat. Beyond this unsavory term hides the complexity of many environments that have grown organically, where “quick fixes” have crystallized into permanent solutions,…
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The Pros and Cons of Open-source Tools
Cost plays a factor in most IT decisions. Whether the costs are hardware- or software-related, understanding how the tool’s cost will affect the bottom line is important. Typically, it’s the engineer’s or administrator’s task to research tools and/or hardware to fit the organization's needs both fiscally and…
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Making performance metrics make sense to your business
A lot of times as administrators or infrastructure people we all too often get stuck “keeping the lights on”. What I mean by this, is we have our tools and scripts in place to monitor all of our services and databases, we have notification set up to alert us when they are down or experiencing trouble, and we have our…
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Will I Save Money by Moving to the Cloud?
This post is post one in a small series, taking an atypical look at the public cloud and why you may or may not want to leverage it. Part 2 asks the question I'm Still On-Premises, Is That OK? and in part 3 we explore SaaS in Beyond IaaS, Cloud for the SMB, the Enterprise, and Beyond! Did you know AWS came about partly…
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Putting on your X-Ray goggles to Visualize the Business Services Spectrum
I love watching those modern movies where IT works magically. In these movies, any average Joe with access to a computer or terminal can instantly access anything with seamless effort. Everything is clear and neat, we’re presented with impeccably clean data centers, long alleys of servers with no spaghetti cables lying…
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Application Dependency Mapping: Security and Ongoing ADM
Application Dependency Mapping: Security and Ongoing ADM Well, here we are. Finally, on the last post of this series. If you have not been following along, you can find the previous posts: part one, part two, part three, part four, and part five. And, if you have been following along, I hope you have found at least…
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The Perils of High Speed Logging
Like many of you, I suspect, I am firmly under the thumb of my corporate security group. When they want to know what’s going on on the network I’ll put in as many taps as they want; but sometimes they want more than that, especially where NAT is involved and IPs and ports change from one side of a device to the other and…
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Business Services and their challenges in complex environments
Business services and infrastructure services have divergent interests and requirements: business services are not focusing on IT. They may leverage IT, but their role is to be a core enabler for the organization to execute on its business strategy, i.e. delivering tangible business outcomes to internal or external…
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Our Cloud Bill Is WHAT?! - Battle of the Clouds Series
Submitted for your approval; a story of cloud horrors. One of performance issues impacting production. Where monthly cloud billing began spiraling out of control. The following story is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. During my consulting career, I’ve encountered companies at many different…
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Skills for IT Operations Management
The technology industry is changing at a rapid pace, but let me put that into perspective. It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users, it took Television 13yrs, the Internet 4 years, Facebook 1,096 days, and Google+ only 88 days. So what's this rapid change in how business is done mean for us in the IT industry? It…