Ontic Oren

Rich Miller (CEO of Replicate) posted about our search for some larger ESX shops.  If you’ve got >40 ESX servers in one virtual center instance, and are interested in a 1 year free subscription to RDA, please get in touch!

We’ve been encouraged by the response to the announcement of RDA 1.0.  The number of visits, registrations and people downloading the free evaluation version of the product has been terrific.  

But we’re not yet satisfied: We are particularly interested in finding organizations with sizable VI3 virtualized datacenters who would like to evaluate the datacenter analyzer.  The majority of our users have indicated that the number of ESX hosts under management by Virtual Center (or should I say vCenter ?) is 20 or less.  We’d like to find the installations with 40 or more ESX hosts under management.  

To that end, we’re extending to three organizations with more than 40 ESX hosts in their datacenter, the opportunity to become a Replicate Technologies design partner.  In exchange for providing us with modest amount of feedback on your experience, design partners will receive one year’s free subscription for the full compliment of servers in the datacenter.  If you’re interested, give us a call or use the sales inquiry submission form here.

New research report out from EMA today that’s well worth looking into.  SearchCIO-Midmarket.com has a great article on it.

Behind these figures are management challenges that companies are only starting to recognize, let alone address, the surveys found. Only 24% of respondents to an Enterprise Management Associates Inc. survey of 627 corporate IT decision makers published last April said they thought virtualization makes security administration easier — as compared with 42% in 2006. Just 32% said software control and distribution is easier in a virtualized environment, down from 58% two years ago. And configuration management numbers plummeted from 58% to 32%.

That’s exactly one of the problems we set out to solve with RDA.  We recognize that administrators are being thrust into administrative positions that challenge them to broaden their expertise dramatically.  Managing a virtualized datacenter requires deep network, storage, server, and virtualization skills, often in very short supply.  RDA helps, by providing clear guidance and prescriptive remediation to help administrators find and fix problems in their datacenter quickly and easily.

Another favorite quote:

ndeed, everything from performance and capacity management to troubleshooting and security administration becomes more difficult in a volatile, multilayered and often heterogeneous virtualized environment, Mann said. 

And finally:

Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of software tools that manage virtual and physical environments or multi-platform virtualized installations in an integrated fashion, the EMA report stated. Only 21% of management tools in use can integrate effectively with other enterprise system management tools, according to EMA’s Mann.

If this sounds like you, go check out RDA!

It’s a sign of just how great and busy we’ve been that it took me 4 days to post this!

As of Monday, November 11th, Replicate’s first product - Replicate Datacenter Analyzer - is officially launched.  

What is RDA? From our website:

Over 60% of downtime, security, and performance issues are due to configuration errors, and virtualization is only going to drive that percentage up. To ensure proper virtual datacenter operation, it is critical to have a holistically configured datacenter based on industry best practices.

Combining empirical data from our IP network probes with configuration information obtained from other individual datacenter elements, RDA constructs a unified view of how the entire datacenter works across different administrative domains. Ensuring that administrators can quickly see the relevant information, RDA “knowledge packs” apply industry defined best-practices to highlight latent problems and overt mis-configuration in a virtualized datacenter that can impact security, reliability, or even downtime.

Go check it out!  We’ve got a free trial, screencasts, and all sorts of other goodies on our website.

Here’s one that I’ve been thinking about for 6+ months:

Oftentimes when you’re going out, looking for a new job, you’re going to fight for highest salary.  I mean, of course, right?  Who wouldn’t?  That’s why we’re in this rat race - more money!

It’s important to realize that there’s are ramifications.  It may seem obvious, but I’m not sure everyone thinks this through.  If you are offered 70K, and negotiate to get 80K, your employer will likely be looking for 12% more work.  The boss may not come out and say it, they may think you’re a great candidate and want to get you on board, but every month, they’ll be looking at your salary, and thinking about what you are worth.  Frankly, it’s easy to negotiate yourselve into a position that you can’t actually perform at yet.

Keep in mind that your “job” at a new position is to make your boss happy.  Most of the time that means doing the work you signed up for, but there’s a whole host of other requirements you have to meet as well. Your negotiation isn’t just getting you more money, it’s piling on the requirements as well. I’d strongly recomend everyone who’s starting a new job read The First 90 Days.  

On the other hand, if that isn’t how your new employer works, you may be getting into the wrong job!  You want to work somewhere that puts personal responsibility on each employee.  If they’re free with the money, what else are they free with?  If they’re desperate to get you on at any cost, are they equally desperate elsewhere?

After all these posts on agile process and tools, if you’re interested in hearing live how I’m using Jira and Greenhopper, then sign up for this webinar Wednesday.

After introductions from Atlassian and Pyxis, I’ll be talking for 15 min on how we’re using them here, on our live dataset.  I’m talking about why we choose Jira/Greenhopper, how the entire team uses it, and what some of my favorite features are.