Tag Archives: Operators

Open Source, Operators, and DevOps Come Together for Data Center Automation

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Running data centers is a complex challenge as the typical environment consists of multiple hardware platforms, operating systems, and processes to manage. Operators face daily “fire drills” to keep the machines running while simultaneously trying to expand service offerings and learn new technologies. The adoption of virtualization and cloud has not simplified anything for IT teams and has only made their job more complicated.

Our founders have years of experience working on deploying and operating large, complex data center environments and clouds. They are also well versed in the open source community space and see the merger of community with operations leading to a better way forward for data center management.

We are building an operators community sharing best practices and code to reuse across work sites to fully automate data centers. Working together operators can solve operational challenges for not just their infrastructure, but also find common patterns to leverage across a broad set of architectures.

Community is a powerful force in the software industry and there is no reason why those concepts cannot be leveraged by operators and DevOps teams to completely change the ROI of running a data center. RackN is founded on this belief that working together we can transform data center management via automation and physical ops.

Join us today to help build the future of data center automation and provisioning technology.

Podcast: Gina Rosenthal (Minks) on Ops Challenges, Day 2 Ops Support, and Dev Ops Communication

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In this week’s podcast, we speak with Gina Rosenthal (Minks), Product Marketing Manager, VMware and experienced sys-admin/operator. She also hosts the Wide World of Tech podcast.

  • Cloud debate on virtualization and hypervisors as requirement
  • What makes Ops so hard?
  • Technical Communities for Day 2 Ops
  • Community Support for Vendors and Open Source
  • Is DevOps different than 5 years ago?
  • Devs and Operators Communication and Working Together

Topic                                                   Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction                                             0.0 – 0.55
Background and Current Work            0.55 – 2.05
Wide World of Tech Podcast                2.05 – 4.00
Sys-Admin and Operators                     4.00 – 4.50
vSphere & Hypervisors for Cloud         4.50 – 5.28 (Hypervisors are a MUST for Cloud?)
What is a Cloud? Virtualization              5.28 – 7.33 (Building Blocks are Virtual?)
OpenStack Experience                           7.33 – 8.16 (Didn’t Fix Metal Part)
What makes Ops so hard?                     8.16 – 12.25
Devs want latest and Ops has old        12.25 – 16.03 (Demos and Stories)
Demo Day 2 for Ops                                16.03 – 19.10 (Maintaining product post install issues)
Community Vendor vs Open Source    19.10 – 25.03 (Vendors not accepted in open source)
Choosing Multiple Vendors/Tech         25.03 – 27.18 (Innovations and Stability)
2 Classes of Operators                            27.18 – 30.00 (Tension b/w new and stable is good)
DevOps is Dead                                        30.00 – 37.44 (VMware covered over Ops issues)
Too Much Abstraction for Devs?            37.44 – 49.55 (Key to Ops and Devs Communication)
Wrap Up                                                     49.55 – END

Podcast Guest
Gina Rosenthal (Minks), Product Marketing Manager, VMware

I have a varied background: technical trainer, *nix sysadmin, technical training developer, community manager, social media marketing manager, and now product marketing manager.

Those are just my paid gigs, I also have a social justice background, and have been blogging for 12 years. All these threads weave together in interesting and powerful ways.

At my core, I’m a storyteller and educator. I’m interested in telling the story of technology in simple, clear terms.

Podcast with Will Dennis talking Crowbar to Digital Rebar and BarClamps

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Joining this week’s L8ist Sh9y Podcast is Will Dennis long-time member of the Crowbar community who continues to engage in helping drive Digital Rebar forward. Will is an excellent resource who takes us through the history from Crowbar to Digital Rebar Provision in a way that highlights how the project has changed and why the community scaled back from V2 to the new V3.1.

Topic                                                            Time (Minutes.Seconds)

Introduction                                                   0.0 – 1:12
What drew you to Crowbar?                       1:12 – 4:29
Secret Language                                          3:05 – 3:39
Ansible Add-On                                            4:29 – 5:08
Crowbar v2                                                     5:08 – 6:03
Heterogeneous Infra                                    6:03 – 8:25
v3 – What had to go?                                   8:25 – 11:12
Building Infra White Paper                         11:12 – 12:07
Cobbler Must Die                                         12:07 – 12:34
UNIX Concept                                              12:34 – 13:00
Cobbler Community                                   13:00 – 16:53
DR – Service in a Workflow                       16:53 – 18:42
HashiCorp & Linux Tool Model                 18:42 – 19:28
Upgrades                                                      19:28 – 20:09
Immutability                                                 20:09 – 26:35
Compromise for Immutable                     26:35 – 32:09
Perfect Fit for Digital Rebar                      32:09 – 33:20
3 Requests for DR Project                         33:20 – END

Podcast Guest: Will Dennis

Will Dennis is currently employed as a Senior Systems Administrator at NEC Laboratories America, and has over 25 years of experience in managing, installing, and troubleshooting enterprise computing systems, networks, and software. A lifelong learner, Will enjoys keeping current with both tech and culture in the field of Information Technology. Will can be found online on Twitter as @willarddennis, and thru LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/willdennis/

September 29 – Weekly Recap Of All Things Digital Rebar And RackN

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Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things Digital Rebar, RackN, SRE, and DevOps. If you have any ideas for this recap or would like to include content please contact us at info@rackn.com or tweet Rob (@zehicle) or RackN (@rackngo)

Items of the Week

Digital Rebar Community

The Community held its first Online Meetup on Tuesday to select the final name of the Mascot as well as cover the latest information on the Digital Rebar Provision 3.1 release. As for the Mascot, Cloudia is the official name of our bear!

Additional new DRP v.31 Videos available:

Events Updates

HashiConf 2017 

Messy yet Effective Hybrid Portability  Rob Hirschfeld Post on the Event

Last week, I was able to attend the HashiConf 2017 event in my hometown of Austin, Texas.  HashiCorp has a significant following of loyal fans for their platforms and the show reflected their enthusiasm for the HashiCorp clean and functional design aesthetic.  I count the RackN team in that list – we embedded Consul deeply into Digital Rebar v2 and recently announced a cutting edge bare metal Terraform integration(demo video) with Digital Rebar Provision (v3).

Overall, the show was impressively executed.  It was a comfortable size to connect with attendees and most of the attendees were users instead of vendors.  The announcements at the show were also notable.  HashiCorp announced enterprise versions of all their popular platforms including Consul, Vault, Nomad and Terraform.  For their enterprise versions include a cross-cutting service, Sentinel, that provides a policy engine to help enforce corporate governance. READ MORE

RackN 

New Product Page on Rackn.com

Have you been to our newly launched product page? If not, click on over now to see the latest on our Data Center Infrastructure provisioning software solution leveraging Digital Rebar Provision 3.1.

Podcast – Challenges of CIOs and Operators for DevOps

Rob Hirschfeld, Co-Founder/CEO of RackN discusses the challenges of DevOps from the CIO and Operator viewpoint and how it is critical for each group to better understand the issues they each face. Only then can a true DevOps experience be had.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus are preparing for a series of upcoming events where they are speaking or just attending. If you are interested in meeting with them at these events please email info@rackn.com

If you are attending any of these events please reach out to Rob Hirschfeld to setup time to learn more about our solutions or discuss the latest industry trends.

OTHER NEWSLETTERS