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Data Infrastructure Server Storage I/O Tradecraft Trends

Data Infrastructure Server Storage I/O Tradecraft Trends

Updated 1/17/2018

Data Infrastructure trends include server storage I/O network and associated tradecraft are your skills, experiences, insight as well as tricks of the trade, profession and job function (read more about what is a data infrastructure here).

This is the second of a two-part series exploring data infrastructure along with serve storage I/O and related tradecraft. Read part one of this series here.

Data Infrastructures
Data Infrastructure and IT Infrastructure Layers

As a refresher from part one, data infrastructure encompasses servers, storage, I/O and networking along with associated hardware, software, services and management tasks including data protection among others. Tradecraft is knowing about tools, technologies, and trends in your primary domain as well as adjacent focus areas. However, tradecraft is also about knowing how and when to use different technologies, tools with various techniques to address different scenarios.

Tradecraft Trends
Trends involving tradecraft include capturing existing experiences and skills from those who are about to retire or simply move on to something else, as well as learning for those new to IT or servers, storage, I/O, and data infrastructure hardware, software, and services. This means being able to find a balance of old and new tools, techniques, and technologies, including using things in new ways for different situations.

Part of expanding your tradecraft skill set is knowing when to use different tools, techniques, and technologies from proprietary and closed to open solutions, from tightly integrated to loosely integrated, to bundled and converged, or to a la carte or unbundled components, with do-it-yourself (DIY) integration.

Tradecraft also means being able to balance when to make a change of technology, tool, or technique for the sake of change vs. clinging to something comfortable or known, vs. leveraging old and new in new ways while enabling change without disrupting the data infrastructure environment or users of its services.

A couple of other trends include the convergence of people and positions within organizations that may have been in different silos or focus areas in the past. One example is the rise of Development Operations (also known as DevOps), where instead of separate development, administration, and operations areas, they are a combined entity. This might be déja vu for some of you who grew up and gained your tradecraft in similar types of organizations decades ago; for others, it may be something new.

Regarding fundamental tradecraft skills, if you are a hardware person it is wise to learn software; if you are a software person, it is advisable to acquire some hardware experience. Also, don’t be afraid to say “I do not know” or “it depends on on” when asked a question. This also means learning how information technology supports the needs of the business, as well as learning the technology the business uses.

Put another way, in addition to learning server storage I/O hardware and software tradecraft, also learn the basic tradecraft of the business your information systems are supporting. After all, the fundamental role of IT is to protect, preserve, and serve information that enables the company or organization; no business exists just to support IT.

Data Infrastructure Tool Box

How to develop tradecraft?
There are many ways, including reading this book along with the companion websites as well as other books, attending seminars and webinars, participating in forums and user groups, as well as having a test lab to learn and try things. Also, find a mentor you can learn from to help capture some of his or her tradecrafts, and if you are experienced, become a mentor to help others develop their tradecraft.

Toolbox tips, reminders, and recommendations:

  • Create a virtual, software-defined, and physical toolbox.
  • Include tip sheets, notes, hints, tricks, and shortcuts.
  • Leverage books, blogs, websites, tutorials, and related information.
  • Implement a lab or sandbox to try things out
  • Do some proof of concepts (POC) and gain more experience

Tradecraft Tips
Get some hands-on, behind-the-wheel time with various technologies to gain insight, perspective, and appreciation of what others are doing, as well as what is needed to make informed decisions about other areas. This also means learning from looking at demos, trying out software, tools, services, or using other ways to understand the solution. Knowing about the tools and technology is important; however, so too is knowing how to use a tool (techniques) and when along with where or for what. This means knowing the tools in your toolbox, but also knowing when, where, why, and how to use a given tool (or technology), along with techniques to use that tool by itself or with multiple other tools.

Additional tips and considerations include:

  • Expand your social and technical network into adjacent areas.
  • Get involved in user groups, forums, and other venues to learn and give back.
  • Listen, learn, and comprehend vs. only memorizing to pass a test.
  • Find a mentor to help guide you, and become a mentor to help others.
  • Collaborate, share, respect and be respected; the accolades will follow.
  • Evolve from focus on certificates or credentials to expansion of experiences.
  • Connect with others to expand your network

Where to learn more

Continue reading more and expanding your tradecraft experiences with the following among other resources:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this means

Remember that tradecraft is skills, experiences, tricks, and techniques along with knowing what as well as how to use various related tools as part of what it is that you are doing. Your data infrastructure tradecraft is (or should be):

  • Essential skills and experiences spanning different technologies and focus areas
  • Knowing various techniques to use new and old things in new as well as hybrid ways
  • Expanding awareness into adjacent areas around your current focus or interest areas
  • Leveraging comprehension, understanding application of what you know
  • Evolving with new knowledge, experiences, and insight about tools and techniques
  • Hardware, software, services, processes, practices, and management
  • From legacy to software-defined, cloud, virtual, and containers

Part of server storage I/O data infrastructure tradecraft is understanding what tools to use when, where, and why, not to mention knowing how to adapt with those tools, find new ones, or create your own.

Remember, if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. On the other hand, if you have more tools than you know what to do with, or how to use them, perhaps fewer tools are needed along with learning how to use them by enhancing your skillset and tradecraft.

In-between the known data infrastructure server, storage, I/O network, converged infrastructure (CI), hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), Docker and other containers, cloud, hardware software-defined known, and unknown is your tradecraft. The narrow the gap between the known and the unknown as well as how to apply your experience is the diversity of your tradecraft.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

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SNOW Fun and Information Technology – They Do Mix

In the spirit of the holidays (which ever holidays you prefer), here’s a bit lighter posting (rest assured, there are plenty of upcoming more technology focused postings in the works) about what many folks in the northern hemisphere are either dreading and dealing with, or, enjoying this time of the year and that is SNOW.

From the deserts of Las Vegas NV to New England, from Canada to Texas and most points in between and that’s just in the U.S., its that time of the year for SNOW (while friends from Oz remind me its summer down under this time of the year).

Holiday HoundsGreg snow sleedingNetworking in the SnowLittle Leo having a SNOW snackGreg walking on "Frozen" waterGreg and Friends Sleeding and Riding on Snowplow

With that in mind and knowing how IT or other tech savvy folks enjoy or depend on the use of acronyms, buzzwords and so forth, here are some reworked terms in the spirit of the northern hemisphere winter season. You might want to down load "Valley Winter Song" (e.g. the song from the LL Bean commercials) rom Fountains Of Wayne via Amazon.com or some other venue if you have not done so to enjoy with your snow or working on your holiday shopping list.

Some acronyms include among others:

  • Backup Target – Where a lot of shoppers are waiting in line or stuck in traffic
  • Backup – Getting out of a snow bank, stuck in traffic, what the snow plows do sometimes
  • Battery backup – Spare or extra batteries to put into all of those new toys and gadgets
  • BC – Before Cold sets in
  • Best practices – How to use the snow removable equipment
  • Bus driver – person driving the metric transit bus full of holiday shoppers and revelers
  • Capacity planning – figuring out where to pile up the snow
  • Chain of events – Car driver on cell phone, Car hits ice, car slides into another car, chain reaction accident
  • Cloud – where the snow comes from
  • Cluster – Many cars piled up together stuck in traffic, nothing moving, see gridlock
  • Compress – Pile the snow up, let it settle
  • DAS – Direct Attached Snowplow
  • DR – Doctor to go see for your cold or back ache from shoveling snow or too much holiday cheer
  • Fibre Channel – How to get the weather channel on local cable
  • Global warming – What those dealing with snow might like to see a bit of right now
  • Generator – Essential equipment for geek’s and techno folks
  • Green – What the snow is now covering on the golf courses in much of the northern hemisphere colder areas
  • Grid – how the traffic highways are plugged with stopped cars and holiday shoppers
  • Grid lock – Encryption and security for grids or traffic jams
  • Hardware- Snow removable equipment
  • ILM – iPhone Loves Multimedia
  • InfiniBand – Giant bow around holiday presents
  • iPhone – I will call you latter
  • iSCSI – What some are referring to the slippery and dirty roads today
  • MSP – Managed snow removal professionals, or the Minneapolis / St. Paul Airport where holiday travelers may be stranded
  • Need Another Shovel (NAS)
  • Networking – Talking with your neighbors
  • NFS – Nevada Fresh Snow
  • North pole – Future location for Google to keep their storage and reduce cooling costs
  • Offline – Power outage or, snow plow gets stuck
  • Offsite – where the snow gets moved too
  • Online – where most snow bound holiday shoppers should be shopping instead of being stuck in the snow
  • Optics – Evening light shows during holiday parades
  • Outsourcing – Have someone else remove the snow
  • PC ? Payment Card
  • PCI – Payment card industry that is busy this time of the year processing credit card transactions
  • POS – Point of sale, plain old shovel
  • Provisioning – going to the store and stocking up on food, fuel and other essentials
  • RAID – Remove All Ice Daily
  • RAIN – Snow before it freezes
  • Removable Media – Chasing the news crew off your property after the nightly light show
  • Replication – Repeated snow storms in a row
  • ROI – Remove old Ice
  • SAS = Sleds and Snow
  • SANd = Stuff at the beach in the summer, stuff on the road in the winter time
  • SPAM – Hormel product
  • SATA – Santa without an "n"
  • Shipping tapes – How 3M gets tape from their factories to you for gift wrapping
  • Single instance – Rare snowstorm like what happened in Las Vegas
  • SLED – snow sled with a disk Dedupe – Let the snow piles shrink
  • Slide ware – Picture on the wall of a nice tropical warm place while the snowstorm is outside
  • Snapshot – Picture of the snow on a tree Restore – When the power comes back on
  • SNOW – Storage Networking Organizations West or, Storage Networking outsource World
  • Software – What goes in the Wii or play station during a snowstorm (if you have power)
  • Spanning tree – very big tree with lots of snow on it
  • SRM – Snow removable management, or, Sunday Rolls into Monday
  • Standby power – Waiting on the phone for the power company to answer during an outage
  • Tape – What 3M makes to wrap presents with
  • Tiered servers – Wait staff at a restraunt
  • Tiered storage – How snow is piled to maximize space
  • Tweet – What takes place on twitter or perhaps from eating too much sweets
  • UPS – The people in the brown trucks bringing things from Amazon and others

    • Snow plow offlineSnow plowingSnow and cold family

    Have a safe and happy holiday season and enjoy the snow while you can.

    Ok, nuff said.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
    twitter @storageio

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