Monday, February 14, 2011

What you see != What you get


As technology continues to advance the gap between technical engineers and technical analysts seems to be widening in regard to broad knowledge of infrastructure and related platforms. Minimizing continued investments into disparate physical hardware platforms and moving to virtualized environments for things such as storage and server deployments confuses folks who have grown up in an environment where one physical device = one logical function. What you see in the rack is no longer a true picture of the logical configuration buried underneath the physical architecture. Hell, where is the console?

How are other folks coping with this? Any suggestions for easily digestible primers or online courseware to help bridge the transition from standalone systems to logical configurations?

2 comments:

Derek said...

Wrapping your head around this stuff and getting a handle on it is a very rough ride indeed. What helps me best is lots of reading and then: "learning by doing". Otherwise it doesn't stick. I'll lab it up and try it out. But the whole virtualization thing still has me scratching my head sometimes, even though I've done it a few times, be it another OS on a MAC via Fusion, my old lappy on the new lappy via vmware Workstation or multiple servers on ESX(i)...

Kevin Rosenjack said...

Well I have decided that Breakfast + Training = Braining and we will be giving it our first go this week. Early mornings mean we can get more staff involved and hopefully this will encourage participation from all of our teams.