50Micron.com

I started this blog in September, 2006. I was working as a storage administrator for “Loan To Learn” a small student loan company in Sterling, Virginia. It was an amazing challenge. We built an enterprise environment from the ground up in amazing time. Overcoming odds, battling beasts, etc. It was great fun.

It’s a pity that the pilot of that particular airliner didn’t see the mountain looming and smacked straight into the side of it without blinking..

The blog was a great place to vent, to talk about the discoveries and problems in running a day-to-day environment. (Something I had only done once before, in 1997 when I was just starting in the industry)

I received a tremendous amount of help from all of you, and I’m hoping the information contained within these “pages” was/is helpful.

Long story short, I think I’ve come to the point where I think this blog has outlived it’s usefulness, at least as a day-to-day diary, both to me and everyone around me. It’s been difficult for me of late because I don’t feel it’s fair to blog about my current clients. They haven’t consented to such public favor (or ridicule, as the case sometimes is.)

My last engagement, government agency, hurt my career.  Spending 2+ years working with a group who have an abhorrent fear of new technologies, or in fact doing ANYTHING new, kept me well behind the curve, technically.  It’s only through sheer luck (and a few people on the west coast that still know my name) that I got this engagement where I actually got my hands on my first VMAX…only one, a year later than just about everyone else I know.  Talked them into their first NAS device while I was there (Celerra)

Sadly, these days I’m still not as in the ‘cutting edge’ mix of things, but I’m diving in wherever I can, and I still have my home projects to keep my skills up.  I’m trying to dive into the design work wherever I can…  But all in all, I don’t have a lot of time to play with the newest and bestest things, it’s a lot of day-to-day crap.

That and I’m realizing that while I’m a good engineer…I kinda suck as a writer.

I think the biggest thing is…I just don’t have that much to rant about anymore..  That’s good right?

Keep in touch, I can be reached at jg (at) 50micron dot com or via twitter @50micron

Um…yes?  Kind of an obvious question in the grand scheme…  In fact I’m really surprised it’s not done more often.

In the grand scheme of things.  Why wouldn’t a small business use something that’s FREE and gives them the ability to maximize their (usually minimal) hardware investment?

I have a customer, one of those little “side” gigs we all take on, a friend of a friend said “I have someone who needs a new server.” and it all went from there.

So I sell them an old Dell 2U (PowerEdge 2650) I’ve got floating around, migrate them off their antique HP ML160, their single server provided domain services, file-server.  SQL and a number of other minor services.

Now that it’s time to upgrade.  Should we spend hours and hours installing a new server, migrating files, SQL, changing all of the ODBC connectors on every workstation to point to the new server?

Or P2V the old server to the new server and be done with it.

VMWare offers a lot of options over and above the obvious.  Once the P2V is done, boot, and you’re done.  Then you can build a second domain controller, seperate off some of the minor functions, maybe even seperate off the fileserver and sql servers.

From an admin standpoint, dual network connections, thinly provisioned luns, and most importantly, the ability to power-cycle a server from 2700 miles away without having to wonder if it’s going to come back up, the ability to remotely mount ISO images as CDrom’s for upgrades.

How easy would it be to do remote software upgrades or install a new Windows server if you could insert a CD remotely?

VMWare ESXi is *FREE* people.

I’m not going to go into the details of what I was doing on the day it happened.  I’ve been there, and it doesn’t do anyone any good to wallow in their misery.

It amazes me that we choose to re-traumatize ourselves every year on the anniversary…complete with graphic visuals and droning, repetitive descriptions of what happened that day.

You don’t tell a rape victim to re-live the experience every year do you?  Ask any medical professional, there is an inherent danger in repeatedly re-opening old wounds.

I think remembering is important – it’s just how we choose to remember. I like to think about the strength, courage and caring so many people displayed during a devistating crisis. I think no victim forgets but they can see the fact that they are a survivor.

Sadly, that’s not what our media is portraying. Gazing into the smoking wound again and again and again in high-definition video doesn’t help us heal, it only serves to inflame anger and keep hatred alive unnecessarily.

Again to use the analogy, it’s like a rape victim being forced to watch a video of the attack again and again in some misguided hope that it will somehow harden them to it. It doesn’t and it never will.

We were violated.  It’s true.  But there comes a point when you  have to start moving towards the future, because nothing can be gained from constantly staring into the past.

Next time you want to slam unions remember this: “A rising tide lifts all boats.”

Even if your job is NOT union, remember that the business has to stay competitive with the union jobs in order to hire people. So a business has to offer a decent salary just to get people to sign on.

Part of what makes America great is the freedom for our workers to collectively bargain for better conditions, thereby raising the bar for other businesses if they want to hire, because the best and the brightest will take the jobs with the better working conditions.

This is also why big business LOVES high unemployment. It makes it easier for business to say “take it or leave it” and offer crap wages and working conditions.  An easy example will be the fact that I’ve seen contract rates fall by 10-15% in the last year alone.

The desperate can be easily pressured to “take it or leave it.”