Saturday, July 17, 2010

The always incredible, informative and oddly enough, required First Post.

There always has to be a first post, and this one is mine. Literally! I've not had a personal website in over a decade due to always being far too busy to maintain the old one. Continuing on in the personal note vein, my family and I are working on moving from Anchorage, Alaska to Salem, Oregon. Once there, I will be setting up a new lab to continue working on several ideas for hardware and software monitoring, storage and virtualization methods. Currently, I use several different versions of VMWare in my day job, being vmware server 1.0.x, 2.0.x, esx 3.5 to 4.0, esxi 3.5 and 4.0. I also design, build and deploy SAN/NAS hardware based on x86 processors running on both software and hardware raid devices, anywhere from 4 disk to 16 disk trays running the OpenFiler linux distribution. I really enjoy this one as it's incredibly flexible and once you get past a couple minor headaches (very minor, as usual RTFM helps immensely) it's an amazing platform for serving data. Whether iSCSI, NFS, SFTP, or SMB it holds up very well. I also use commercial SANs from Dell/Equallogic. They've created some amazing iSCSI storage systems that I've been using for years now. Hopefully I'll be able to give them some competition in the upcoming years.

I'm also redesigning our current monitoring system and basing it off of a very small embedded devices known as Gumstix. These devices are amazing! If you haven't had the chance to check one out, you really should. Entry level devices can be had fairly cheap, and if you can use linux, you can use these.

There you have it. First Post.