mbleib

Without an agreed upon plan, whether you call it an SOW, or a project plan or literally just notes, you've got nothing to refer to when experiencing scope creep. You have no way to validate change control. And, the customer has no way to hold you to plan metrics, or timelines. Never undertake a project without some…

I've always liked the expression that states: You have two years and one mouth. Maybe it's for a reason?

Couldn't agree more. Plus, as an architect, our role is to make sure that our salespeople don't send the customer in a potentially unsuccessful project because they've sold by popularity rather than functionality

Agreed completely. As I think about this, the goal is not to become obsolete. Training, research, etc. are methods to not become outdated. Well said, Peter.

Personally, I love the flow of conversation. This is just another example.

I once wrote a blog piece about Parsimony. In Simplicity is Greatness, or Parsimony is often the best answer – Virtuallytiedtomydesktop's Blog This talks about just this issue, and I think kind of well.

‌Certainly privacy concerns or secure connections can throw wrinkles into this process. Not at all insurmountable. Once credentials are established even with load balancers or bandwidth optimizers. These kinds of hurdles are what makes projects like this interesting. Yet, there are some hurdles yet to be crossed.

I've never been there, but I've always wanted to try it.

You know, you're right, of course. A CFO makes decisions on one hand, the CTO Should make them on the other hand. Accomodations should be made. Often, though, I find these decisions to be poorly orchestrated. My advice, as the "Trusted Advocate" is to ensure that all points of view are given appropriate weight.

These phrases are way too ambiguous. Maybe that's by design, but I do feel that these efforts can be very grey, and as such could get both the customer and the partner in trouble. I might suggest refining them.

I do think that it is easy to argue that Puppet and Chef are part and parcel to the DevOps toolkit, as are things like PowerShell, and even Ruby on Rails. Please remember, I'm no developer, scripter, or even a user of DevOps. My perspective here comes from my knowledge as a sysadmin from a while back. I can foresee a…

You can never be faulted for approaching your architectural conversations with integrity and "best practice." I do agree, the "out" of I told you so is always helpful. And, as always, document your stuff.

I'm glad to hear your experience w/ HPe is good thus far. For us as well. I wish that we could get the email policies to comply, spam can get so irritating, and the truth is, it can give us the buyers/recommenders a sour taste in making those decisions.

Any quantum shift in approach can have its pain at the outset. If some of your un- or under-utilized capacity is wasted, there may be opportunities to capitalize on those resources toward other functions... I also believe that this could provide a new-found freedom to an IT organization. That being said, it's not always…

Consistency is key. But, I would argue that there's a big piece that speed and agility can benefit an organization as well. If you deploy a new firewall or router rule to a one-at-a-time set of devices, you can find your organization halting on many fronts. So consistency and agility to me are equally critical.

Full disclosure: I work for a consulting firm that does a lot of Splunk deployment and implementation. We have a crew of people with amazing Dashboard creation skills. Feel free to reach out if you're looking for some talent in that area. This, btw, is not a skill I possess.

Hence the expression: An Old Guy's advice... If nothing else, the time spent in the industry gives me perspective on newer technologies. I can base what I do, in terms of newer tech, and newer approaches to architecture from a framework of what I've done before. I don't know if it's an advantage, but it is part of me.

You're absolutely right. Of course, this relies on their willingness to keep us on their vendor list. But to whine about it is really not valuable. To keep shining, as you so astutely say, to set apart from the competition, is critical to the differentiation we've hoped will be our calling card.

Didn't know you were in Cary. I'm in Evanston.

If you can't rely on the vendor, on whom can you count??? Certainly not the "Magic Quadrant!" The thing is, if you don't really research the things you are hoping to evaluate, you're just as doomed as if you simply listen to the vendor.

I have to agree, that the Aruba acquisition was a beautifully articulated one, that also incorporated quite well into the corporation, and product stream.

Fortunately, I'm not at a place where your comment is accurate, but it sure is funny, universal and often the prevailing dynamic. I did laugh. I've been there before. Again, all integrators have bias, but fortunately, our goal is a happy and long lived customer.

I know companies running all of these architectures. Nutanix is very solid. I would never disrespect that tech driving things forward, nor would I EMC, Simplivity, or any others. My job is to recommend the best solution for the customer who expresses specific use cases. I hope to suss out all the reasons and motivations…

I think that the key to an Openstack decision has to do with many things, but it should never have to do with costs. Supportability and maintenance, training, learning curve, etc can so change the metric that often overrides the costs factor so as to make it a wash. that level of conversation A company must avoid making…

If there's a very large dataset, and a lack of appropriate time to do the replication across the wire, typically a seeding of data is utilized. Even Glacier has a "We send you a large jbod, you populate it and ship it back" methodology.

I wonder what the impact of VMware's relationship with AWS may have on Project Photon. Anyone have any ideas?

Any well-designed environment involves appropriate security concerns. The purpose of this posting was to discuss some of the app ramifications regarding moving to the cloud, and I guess I assumed that those reading this were critical enough in their projects that security would be top of mind with all their projects. My…

@jfrazier This is why I rarely allow the salesperson to make commitments. The job of the SA in these deals is to ensure that no promises are made (Particularly on SLA's) that cannot be carried out. I'm reminded of Alan Alda in a Woody Allen movie, where he said comedy should bend, but never break. Well, stretching the…

I truly only feel the pressure I put on myself. My desire to do the best I can to provide the best and most detailed solutions I can, in as efficient a timeframe as I'm able don't change, whether I'm getting pressure from above or not.

Well said, and a very good point, @JFrazier