All posts by Scott Alan Miller

Started in software development with Eastman Kodak in 1989 as an intern in database development (making database platforms themselves.) Began transitioning to IT in 1994 with my first mixed role in system administration.
Architecture

Understanding the Role of the Dell VRTX

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Dell’s VRTX is one of those devices that is just sexy, as IT hardware goes. It strikes a chord and drives IT professionals nearly wild. It looks cool, it has an incredible amount of power, it can be rack mounted or placed under a desk, it is quiet – so quiet that it can be run right in the middle of an open office space. It’s just really cool, and nearly every IT professional wants one – even if they have no idea why.

The problem with the VRTX is that it is generally misunderstood and the misunderstandings around the device itself and the architecture used within it have led to a lot of proposals, nearly continuous, to use the device where it is least suited. The device itself truly is awesome and has excellent use cases, but it is very important to understand what they are and what they are not as this is a very specialty piece of hardware.

First, we need to determine what the VRTX “is”. The Dell VRTX is primarily a blade enclosure, more or less like any blade system. But unlike traditional blade enclosure that typically hold six to ten blades per enclosure, the VRTX only holds four. So it is a “baby” blade enclosure. Because it is a true blade system, the Dell VRTX carriers the normal caveats of any blade enclosure. However, due to its small size the probability of it being able to be used, and retired, effectively make it quite a bit more reasonable to consider than traditional, larger blade enclosures. So an understanding of its blade nature is important in evaluating it for your organization’s needs.

Along with the included blade component, the VRTX also has a DAS (Direct Attached Storage) system attached via SAS to the blades. This storage array offers either twelve large form factor (3.5”) or twenty five small form factor (2.5”) hard drives attached by way of either one or two PERC8 hardware RAID controllers. This included, large scale, shared external storage array inside of the VRTX blade enclosure is what makes the VRTX unit truly unique.

So all four blades share the single DAS unit for storage. The four blades constitute 2U of the VRTX enclosure and the DAS unit another 2U for a total enclosure size of 4U.

Of course, as with any blade system, there is no requirement that you fully populate the VRTX initially, or ever. The system can be used with any number of blades from one to four, as needed. But the value of a blade enclosure, especially a small one such as this, depends heavily on being completely populated or nearly so, to be cost viable.

Architecturally what the VRTX represents is a highly compact, single chassis, Inverted Pyramid of Doom (the “traditional” 3-2-1 architectural design) built following what are, more or less, the best approaches for that type of system. The biggest advantages here are that the use of a solid DAS is mandated and cannot be altered and all connections between the DAS and the compute nodes are hard wired internally for the highest level of potential reliability for a shared external storage system with the least opportunity for human failure. By using DAS instead of SAN in this example, our 3-2-1 has its “2” layer removed resulting in a far better inverted pyramid structure. What we are left with is a 4-1 inverted pyramid design.

The overall profile of the VRTX is one of massive compute capabilities, far outstripping the computational needs of a normal SMB business, all in a single chassis. The smallest blade option is a dual processor module and the biggest are quad processor meaning that when populated we have a minimum of eight Intel Xeon processors over four nodes and a maximum of sixteen Intel Xeon processors over four nodes. This is truly a mammoth computational system in a small package. But it is critical to understand that all of this horsepower shares a single storage array and is not highly available and cannot be made so. This is a system designed for processing power, not as a reliable infrastructure component.

It should also be noted that Dell experienced reliability issues with the redundant PERC8 hardware RAID controller setup and had to pull it from the market for some time. As with nearly all storage systems in this category, which includes many DAS and SAN devices, redundant controllers are commonly the cause of storage outages rather than the preventers of such. Redundancy of RAID controllers is rarely a valuable addition and should never be looked on as a panacea to storage reliability concerns.

Given that fact that the VRTX is compute heavy and reliability weak, what are its designated use cases? Where does it make the most sense to consider deploying this unit?

There are three extremely common deployment scenarios today where large compute and shared “fragile” storage often fit. Of course there may be many special cases and those should be evaluated individually based on the power, cost and reliability profiles of the VRTX relative to other options. But by and large the big three use cases where we would want to see the VRTX deployed would be:

Enterprise Remote Office and Branch Office (ROBO): This use case is based around the concept of the VRTX being a single device, easily deployable with nothing to do but to “plug it in” delivering a “reliable enough” but very powerful platform for remote offices. Not every remote or branch office would need the kind of horsepower than a VRTX can provide and some would require high availability which it does not have, but large ROBOs are often ideally suited to this architectural profile due to the ease of remote management and the common ability to use remote access to a central office or datacenter as a means of providing failover and reliability in the event of a major disaster either to IT itself (such as a total failure of the VRTX) or to the ROBO itself (fire, flood, etc.)

A VRTX in this scenario can easily be the sole IT device, outside of networking equipment, powering an entire ROBO of hundreds or potentially even thousands of users. And the ability to do nearly all maintenance in a non-disruptive way, which if properly designed is trivial to provide with a VRTX, can be quite significant to a ROBO.

The concept of this being solely for the “enterprise” ROBO rather than SMB ROBOs is simply because of the total scale of the VRTX being larger than the typical needs of an SMB as a whole let alone the needs of just one remote office. The VRTX is just too “big” for the typical needs of an SMB without being specifically focused on the needs of SMB.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI): VDI generally requires a large amount of compute power, non-disruptive updates and shared storage which is perfect for the VRTX. Of course this only makes sense in shops that need at least three nodes, if not four nodes, of compute power to leverage the blade chassis natural of the VRTX. But for companies looking for eight to sixteen CPUs worth of VDI power the VRTX can be a slam dunk. Possibly no use case is more appropriate for the VRTX than as a single, modular VDI system.

Big Data: Not many SMBs look to do big data processing today (Hadoop, Apache Spark, etc.) but a VRTX can be an ideal platform for doing huge processing in a small business that does not need to scale its data processing beyond this point. For larger enterprises needing a much larger scale of processing the VRTX would not be well suited, what makes it exceptionally valuable is in matching the size to the organization’s need. Of course other kinds of computationally heavy processing, such as Monte Carlo simulations, would also work well on this platform.

Now that we know where the VRTX is well suited, where does it not fit well?

The VRTX is very poorly suited to general computing use, in both the SMB and the enterprise sectors. In the enterprise the VRTX represents a fully contained, but non-scaling, stack which would be unwieldy and expensive in a large infrastructure.

In the SMB the VRTX is dramatic overkill on the computational size while underkill, generally in reliability, on the storage side. Most SMBs, when scaling past a single computation node, are seeking both flexible scalability as well as higher than typical reliability. Often it is a desire for high availability alone that drives SMBs past a single computation node considering the incredible capacity of a single node that is available today. So moving to an inverted pyramid architecture would be counter-productive to the needs of the typical SMB. The VRTX is simply too big, too rigid and lacks the reliability profile desired by SMBs. The SMB is really the last market where I would expect the VRTX to be deployed as general computing needs that drive SMB needs simply is the farthest appropriate use case for this device.

The VRTX is an amazing piece of equipment and well designed for several niche use cases, but is not designed to replace or be used in typical scenarios where standard servers, such as the Dell PowerEdge R730, have been designed to be the ideal equipment. General use equipment exists as the industry standards and best sellers for a reason, niche equipment also exists for a reason. Be sure to understand why the equipment you are considering makes sense for your environment, new and interesting is not enough to justify moving to special case gear.

Career, Education

Choosing a University Degree Program for IT

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In my last article I looked at the overarching concerns and approaches to an university program and how it would apply to us in IT. Now we will look at individual programs and how to approach the selection of a major and focus area within the university system.

Of actual degree programs we face a world of complexity as universities and colleges often use any variety of names for their programs of study and often attempt to use one program to teach another so a program name will often not match the actual field of study which can be very bad as you do not want to be in a position of needing to explain this discrepancy to potential employers or existing employers. An example of this was a well known northeastern school that lacked the ability to offer an IT program so relabeled their existing library science program to IT and passed that off as such for many years.

The first thing to consider is if we want to have a focused program in our field or one outside of the field. Given what we learned from the last article, that universities excel at liberal and traditional subjects and do poorly at technical ones and that our goals are to be broadly educated and not focused on specific skills, I general prefer to see students or job candidates who have been through non-technical course loads rather than technical ones.

There are any number of good non-technical programs from which to choose. Great examples include communications, business, accounting and psychology. It is good, of course, if any program includes some technical concepts such as project management and systems analysis, but these can simply be addressed through electives. It is also best if any program include studies in math, especially statistics and risk analysis, and general business classes, basic accounting and management. Students, we hope, will leave school with a firm foundation in understanding business context, people and communications because these are the soft skills that are most critical to an IT career and even moreso to an SMB IT career where there is far less departmental isolation between some tech positions and the operational side of the business.

For those that do not want to take the most liberal of paths as described above, universities often offer a large range of degrees within or near the IT discipline itself. This plethora of IT or IT-like options can often lead to confusion and risks making the selection rather dangerous as a highly technical degree that is in the wrong area of study would be the worst possible option – teaching neither IT nor teaching the broad skill set that IT practitioners desperately need. Even worse is going through the wrong field of study will often wildly mislead students as to what to expect when they enter the IT field and may actively look extremely bad on a resume as it can appear (and rightfully so in many cases) that the student did not take the time to understand their chosen field of study, know what degrees would be applicable to it and failed to realize this through years of university classes or did and did not bother to switch to an appropriate program! This is what we most want to avoid, actively bad degree programs.

To make this as challenging as possible, IT degrees often come with a variety of names. And IT degrees may be included under multiple schools or colleges within a university. Some universities have IT degrees inside of an IT school, others may have them within a more general science program, a math program or often within engineering. Some even have IT degrees under a business school. It is not unheard of for IT degrees to exist in multiple places within the same university with different foci depending on which college is administering the program.

We must also address the big question of “is software engineering and programming a part of IT?” In universities, the answer is generally yes even though in the professional world the answer is a resounding “no” – the two are clearly different fields of study and different disciplines. Software engineering is dedicated to the design and building of products. IT is dedicated to the building and support of the infrastructure of businesses. There is some overlap as any two fields might have, but they are very clearly different career fields that deal with extremely different day to day duties and tasks. It is quite common to find software engineering, developer and programmer courses and degree programs lumped into the same schools as IT or even put under an IT umbrella. This is not necessarily bad but can be quite confusing. We must be clear, however, that software engineering is not IT and any degree focused on programming should be avoided for someone with an interest in heading into the world of IT. Any respectable IT program is going to teach programming as a core foundation to the field, but the program will never be focused on it. If it is, this is a mislabeled program and should be avoided.

Proper IT programs should have names such as Information Technology, Computer Information Systems or Management Information Systems. IT and CIS programs are often interchangeable. MIS programs tend to be a subset of IT more focused on certain management-supporting aspects of IT.

Programs that are most insidious and dangerous to IT hopefuls are ones that are most closely named but least closely associated with the IT field: computer engineering and computer science. These two should never, ever cross paths with those looking for careers in IT.

Computer engineering is older than IT and is a subset of electrical engineering. This is a traditional engineering field that focuses on the design of computers and computer components (like processors, chips, boards, peripherals) themselves and has effectively no crossover with IT or any IT-related discipline in any way. Computer engineering and IT should almost never even appear within the same school or college within a university.

If software engineering (which itself is not an IT discipline but is at least closely related) is the programming world’s analogue to the world of traditional product development engineering then computer science is the programming world’s analogue to physics or mathematics. Computer science is truly a “science and math” type field, developing the theories and foundation that is then used by the software engineering discipline to build products often used and managed by the IT discipline. Computer Science, CS, is probably the most commonly mistaken field that IT hopefuls will enter and if a true CS program it is completely inappropriate and a waste of time. This is the program to look out for the most. Avoid CS completely and avoid any university attempting to pass IT programs off as CS, the two never overlap.

Do not take the selection of a university major lightly. My recommendation is to keep your selection as liberal as possible, use electives to introduce IT elements like basic programming and networking into your curriculum, fill your time with mind-broadening classes and learn about business, finance, accounting, communications, writing, speaking and statistics. Attempt to find internships or opportunities in the university to work with IT departments. Actively work to leverage your opportunities at university to make yourself as prepared as possible to focus on the specific skills of IT externally to your university training.

Career, Education

How to Approach the University Experience

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All discussions of university versus non-university aside, once a university (or college as the Americans generally refer to it) is chosen, the next step is choosing a degree program that will fulfill our needs for our chosen profession. This, of course, is based on the presumption that our chosen profession is going to be IT. If you are not interested in a career in IT, this is probably not the article for you.

University programs can be problematic, especially in IT, because they are often mislabeled, students often do not know what area of study they are interested in before beginning their studies and those pushing students towards university are often inexperienced in IT and do not understand the relationship between specific programs and the field itself. So those directing students towards university studies with the intention of a career in IT will very often pressure them into university programs ill-suited to IT careers at all.

Two things that we need to consider when looking to choose a degree program: what universities themselves are good at providing and what will be useful to us in our IT careers.

First, where do universities shine? The university system, its very core goals and values, are often completely unknown to the general public which makes the broad use of universities a bit odd and problematic on its own. The university system was never meant to train students for specific careers but instead to introduce them to many concepts and foundational knowledge (not foundational industry knowledge you must note) and to force them to think broadly and critically. In this aspect, good universities usually shine.

It should be noted that some universities, including a very famous and well respected US university on the east coast openly stated that its mandate was not to educate or service students in any way and that students attended its schools solely to finance the professors who were its actual product – beware that your university choices see education as a goal, not a necessary evil.

Treating a university as a trade school is a fundamental mistake made by many, probably most, students. Course choices are not intended to be focused on specific skills that will be used “on the job” but on skills that will make one a more generally useful member of society. For example the intended use of a university is not to teach someone the specific ins and outs of managing Active Directory design on Windows Server 2016; that would be the job of a trade school. Instead university programs are intended to be more broadly based such as teaching data structures, authentication concepts or even more broadly in areas like writing and communications.

A student leaving university is not intended to be ready to hit the ground running in a real world job; that is not a goal of the system. Instead the idea is that the student be well versed in the necessary skills to help them learn the specifics of a job or career and be overall better suited for it. It is not about speeding someone into a career but preparing them for a lifetime in the field at a heavy cost to the short term. The hope being that either the student has no concerns with finances (the traditional amateur system) or will make up for the cost (in both hard finances and in career setbacks) of university over the span of their careers. Understanding this is key to understand how to approach university education to gain the appropriate value that we seek.

Second, What is useful education to us in our IT careers? At an early stage in our careers it is generally impossible to predict which skills are going to be the ones that we will need to leverage throughout our career lifespans. Not only do we not know what industry niches we will want to pursue, but we also have little ability to predict which skills will be needed or even exist in the future. And even furthermore nearly all people working in IT, if not every field, have little ability to totally pick and choose the area of technology in which they will end up working but will instead be required to learn the skills of the jobs that become available to them, moving through their careers more organically than in a specifically predefined way.

Because of this, as well as because of the university values mentioned above, focusing on specific technical skills would be almost wholly a waste during the university time frame. Of drastically more value to us are soft skills and more broad ones such as developing a great world view, understanding business and accounting practices and concerns, learning psychology and sociology, studying good management practices, communications and, probably above all, becoming well versed in both written and oral business communications. Companies hiring IT professionals tend to complain about the lack of these skills, not a lack of technical competence, especially in smaller businesses where nearly all IT practitioners have a large need to communicate effectively with end users and often even management. Having a broad understanding of other job roles and the overall workings of businesses has great value for IT practitioners as well. IT only exists in a business context, the firmer the grasp of that context the more value someone in IT has the potential to provide.

For the most part, what we want from our university experience actually lines up with what universities are best prepared to provide. What is least useful to us, throughout our lives, would be highly specific technical skills that are overly focused too early in our careers (or even before they have begun) and skills that would rapidly become outdated often even before leaving university.

So where does this leave us? First we should look at the broadest degree options. Whether we are beginning to look at Associates (two year) degrees or Bachelor (four year) degrees we generally have a choice of an “of Arts” or an “of Science” option and, in a few rare cases, an “of Professional Studies” option. Each of these is simply a point along a sliding scale with an Arts degree being the most liberal and focusing the least on the area of study selected. A Science degree is more focused and less liberal than the Arts degree. And the rare Professional Studies option is even more focused than a Science degree with very little liberal studies, basically the polar opposite of an Arts degree.

Of these degree options, almost universally I recommend the Arts approach. A heavy focus on specific skills is generally a poor approach to university for any degree field but in IT this is more dramatic than almost any other. Classes and coursework heavily specific are not generally useful with education becoming overly focused on a single area. A Science approach is a reasonable option, but I would lean away from it. The Professional Studies approach is a clear attempt to mimic a trade school program and should be avoided both because it is a very poor use of university resources as well as being so rare that it would require regular explanation whenever a new person encountered it.

Staying highly liberal with our studies provides the best overall benefit from the university experience. Not only does it let us best leverage what the university offers but it also gives us the best foundation for our careers. There is also a hidden benefit, and that is career risk mitigation.

Career risk mitigation here refers to our university training not being overly specific so that should we decide later that IT is not the field that we want to pursue or after some time that it is not the career in which we want to remain that our education supports that flexibility in an effective way. Perhaps our IT careers will lead us into management or entrepreneurship. Or maybe our IT experience will be in a field that we end up enjoying more than IT. Or we might live in a place where our IT opportunities are few and other opportunities exist. There are myriad reasons why having a broad, flexible education isn’t just the best for our IT careers but also the best for our non-IT careers.

Thinking about how university works and understanding its core goals and how they apply to ourselves is the first step in being prepared to leverage the university experience for optimum value.

Career, Education

Getting Started with IT Certifications

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This question surfaces very regularly: you are at the beginning of your IT career or maybe have not even gotten into your career yet, and are wondering where to get started with certifications. Maybe you are in high school, maybe you have finished college, perhaps you are six months into your first job and feel that having a certification will help to move you forward. There are a lot of options and a lot of information about IT industry certifications out there but pretty regularly the advice around getting started comes down to just a few basic opinions and I will share mine (having worked in the certification industry for many years and having spent time both as a hiring manager and as a corporate career counselor in IT.)

Certifications that often get mentioned for people “starting” in IT include the CompTIA A+, CompTIA Network+ (often called the Net+), Microsoft’s MTA certifications and Cisco’s CCNA.

When just getting started in IT, though, I recommend starting with a firm foundation. Some certs, like those from Microsoft and Cisco, might be great but begin to take you down very specific career paths which may or may not be the right ones for you. We should hold off on those kinds of certifications until we have a little of the basics firmly under our belts. They can be great as a next step, but we do not want to get ahead of ourselves.

It is also extremely important to note that the Microsoft MTA exams are “pre-professional” certs, not certs for IT Pros. They are not meant to demonstrate a level of skill for an existing IT Pro or even to show that someone is ready to work as an IT Pro but instead to show that someone is ready to intern in IT or to attend IT classes. The MTA is targeted at high school students to take after entry level high school classes and are too low level to be considered even at the college level, let alone at the working level. You should never include these on a resume, even if you have them, once you are working in the field. They are excellent for showing initiative for high school classes but should not be used as goals of their own.

CompTIA is a vendor neutral certification authority so tends to be a good starting spot in IT. CompTIA also focuses on more entry level and broad certifications than most other providers. This makes then exceptionally well suited to entry level folks looking to certify themselves before moving into more specific career paths. And because they tend to focus on foundational knowledge the effort spent certifying is rarely wasted at an educational level either.

CompTIA has two major certs that are generally considered here, the A+ and the Network+. The A+ is by far the more well known outside of IT circles, and this is actually because it is not an IT certification at all. The A+ was originally designed to certify that someone had the appropriate experience level of someone having worked on a helpdesk for six months. However the knowledge tested by the A+ generally covers archaic hardware and tasks that generally do not exist in IT at all but belong to another, related, field of “bench work.” No amount of IT experience, even decades of it, would prepare you for the exam. This makes the A+ specifically targeted at bench careers and has become the industry standard in that area – which includes local computer stores, Best Buy’s Geek Squad, Staples and other non-IT computer “fix it” shops. The skills tested by the A+ are too “low” to be useful for testing in IT and focus on aspects of computers that are rarely, if ever, of concern to IT.

The A+ tends to focus very heavily on hardware and physical repair of consumer equipment. It does not cover tasks common to any level or style of IT. While some entry level IT areas would consider the knowledge in it common, most IT disciplines would not see it as foundational or useful and even the most senior IT professionals would often find it obtuse at best.

CompTIA’s other general purpose certification is the Network+, originally designed to represent the level of knowledge expected after “two years” working in IT. Both of these assessments are very poor, the A+ represents general knowledge or low level archaic knowledge that you would hope the general public would have and the Network+ really represents the knowledge level that you would look for a new hire, first IT job person to have. The Network+ is not a differentiator, therefore, between candidates but more of a foundational level of knowledge and a standard requirement. But that does not make it bad to have, it makes it good. The Network+, unlike its counterpart, does indeed focus on common and very important IT knowledge that those seeking a career in the field should most certainly have or acquire if lacking.

The Network+ represents standard knowledge useful for effectively any IT position or career no matter what technology or area of focus one chooses to pursue. For someone looking to go after their very first job or for someone looking to establish that they are well qualified in their first position or even for someone just looking to prepare themselves for the world of certification testing, the Network+ is an ideal starting point.

It is very unlikely that a Network+ on its own is going to lead to a job or promotion, but it establishes a starting point for looking towards other things. It is, more or less, the final “standard” starting point for nearly everyone in the IT field today. Many will not take the Network+ and certainly there are many options to enter the field without it, but I personally recommend it to everyone in every focus of IT. The knowledge needed for it will be useful throughout a career. As a starting point for a certification portfolio it is unrivaled.

The Network+, as the name implies, focuses almost exclusively on networking knowledge. This does not mean that it is only suitable for those interested in networking related IT careers. Networking is a part of everything that we do in IT today and is even important knowledge for non-IT users who want to understand their computers and their networks better. Even very non-network jobs like database administration would benefit from a firm foundation in networking.

Moving forward from the Network+ the world of certifications opens up and this begins a much more complex discussion. CompTIA offers other, good, general purpose certifications, such as the Security+, but at this stage we should be prepared to begin a bit of soul searching to determine exactly what path we want our careers to take from here. There are so many aspects of the IT field there is no way to provide a solid, reliable next step without looking at both short term and long term career goals and interests.