Posts

In my last post about Oracle Ravello Bloggers Day 2, I mentioned the distinction between OCI and the Ravello Systems product. I wanted to take some time to dive a bit into what Ravello has been up to because there is some cool stuff going on there. If you happen to not be familiar with Ravello Systems, it is a cloud service where you can run VMs. OK, doesn’t sound special in this day and age, right? The differences become apparent once you start using it. The interface and approach strike me as being quite different than most offerings on the market today. ...

DISCLAIMER: NAKIVO is a sponsor on this site as of the time of this writing; although this is a sponsored post, the words and impressions below are my own. Earlier this week, the much-anticipated 7.4 Beta of NAKIVO Backup & Replication was released. Although it is still in Beta, there are quite a few new features that were shipped with it. I grabbed a copy to play around with and I wanted to cover what I thought were some noteworthy features. ...

A little while back I wrote about being frozen by fear of failure when it comes to making a decision. During one of the conversations I had on Twitter, I mentioned that I had experienced something different in the past. Rather than being frozen by fear of failure, I’ve found myself being frozen by fear of success. Sounds odd, right? WHAT DOES GETTING THIS RIGHT MEAN? By nature, I tend to be a bit of a cautious person. This has its benefits, but it also has its downfalls. Being cautious can lead to a lot of missed opportunities. Although that may not bother folks (I’m usually not phased by my decisions), it can be detrimental to career growth. Remedying it isn’t easy - you don’t want to start making “shoot from the hip” decisions to try and offset this. ...

I was recently fortunate enough to be invited to the second Oracle Ravello Blogger Day. A previous blogger day was held in 2017, and although I couldn’t attend, the content I saw generated from it showed that it was a great event. I was excited to see how far Oracle, and by extension Ravello has come in the past year. With about 30 bloggers in attendance, of which about %40 were there last year, it was a great event. ...

We are just about halfway through March now, and with that, a lot of the major IT industry influencer programs have kicked off. I am extremely excited to be a part of a few of these for 2018. Yes, a lot of them may have fancy titles, but that is somewhat beside the point. In most cases, folks are accepted based on contributions that they have made, usually in a public fashion. ...

I’d like to extend a warm welcome to Vembu, who is the newest sponsor on this site. Founded in 2002, Vembu is a strong player in the backup and recovery market. Although their roots are in with virutalized environments, they have grown to offer protection for all sorts of environments. Solutions for physical, virtual, or SaaS offerings are availablein the Vembu BDR Suite. For more information about Vembu and their BDR suite, or to try out some of their free tools, you can visit my partner page for them. ...

With 2017 behind us, I found myself doing some reflecting on the tech industry. In particular I found myself looking back at some of the trends I saw at Tech Field Day 14 & 15, which were about 6 months apart. As it turns out, it was interesting to see some small signs of change in May, and then see additional and more prevalent changes in September. CONTAINERS & THE DEVOPS MOVEMENT There is no doubt that the use of containers continued to grow in 2017. We saw more and more announcements around products, as well as what seemed to be a larger adoption in use. Some recent buzz in the industry was created when Red Hat announced its intent to acquire CoreOS. Although we saw this announcement in 2018, it builds on the direction from 2017. ...

I recently ran into an interesting situation where my Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 stopped working. As a bit of background, I had recently moved the software to a new server. A bit of tangent, but one of the things I love about Veeam’s Office 365 backup is how small it is. The download is less than 12 MB! That makes setup quick and easy. Back to the problem … There wasn’t anything that immediately stood out. The job wasn’t running based on its schedule, nor could I start it manually. Something was definitely up. ...

Veeam introduced yet another new product in 2017, in the form of Veeam PN. When it was first introduced at VeeamON 2017, it was a Release Candidate (although quite functional). Yesterday Veeam announced that the product is now Generally Available (GA), which basically means it is a “true” product. But, what does this mean for Veeam? For the bulk of Veeam’s life, it has been a data protection company, and it has, and still does, perform exceedingly well in the market. But with Veeam PN, Veeam is now getting into the networking game. But why? ...

I recently sat down with a colleague at work, and after a few minutes of chatting, we got on to the topic of how to be effective. More specifically, we touched on the topic of what made people ineffective. One trait that we both noticed throughout the years has been the inability to make a decision. Regardless of the role (subordinate, peer, or superior), we can see folks like this in the workplace, or in everyday life for that matter. It tends to be a real issue when it comes to succeeding. ...