Archive

Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category

AWS re:Invent 2017: The Day 1 Buzz

November 28th, 2017 No comments

image

AWS Re:Invent kicked off in ernest today, 43,000 cloud makers and learners spread across 5 hotels, basically taking over Las Vegas. Its difficult to appreciate the size of the conference as you could be involved in part of the conference and be very separate from another area.

See my preview posts yesterday, AWS re:Invent 2017: The Show Preview as well as re:Invent 2017: The Day 0 Buzz for what I’m concentrating on.

This morning, the 1st proper day of the conference, I started off with a hot topic for all of IT at the moment, security. As I’m currently consulting in the financial sector, this session piqued my interest.

FSV301 – Security Anti-Patterns: Mistakes to Avoid

Kurt Gray from AWS and Jonathan Baulch from Fidelity Investments

This was a really great session with lots of useful tips. I wrote it up separately here:

AWS re:Invent 2017: Security Anti-Patterns: Mistakes to Avoid – FSV301

It’s a shame I had to leave a little early as I needed to head across Vegas because size of conference.

SRV213 – Thirty Serverless Architectures in 30 Minutes

Chris Munns from AWS

Unfortunately I was in the walk up line for this one and despite my dash across Vegas, they only let in 20 people so missed out on the session, a shame, I hope its posted afterwards.

Read more…

Categories: AWS, re:Invent Tags: , ,

My Chinwag with Mike Laverick

March 23rd, 2012 No comments

Expert virtualisation opinionator extroadinaire, Mike Laverick, very kindly invited me to have a chinwag this week. I’ve known Mike for a few years through the VMware community and we’ve chatted at length often so was great to be able to do it again as a chinwag.

We had a great chat talking about certificates, VDI strategy, private cloud CraaP! & SRM with PowerCLI.

You can see/hear/subscribe to/download the chinwag from here:
http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/2012/03/23/chinwag-with-julian-wood-episode-71/

Thanks Mike!

Categories: Blog, VMware Tags: ,

Want to see HP Flex-10 and ESX(i) at VMWorld? Vote for session 3005!

May 10th, 2011 4 comments

VMworld 2011 is coming up and one of the great things about the conference is independent community members can also offer to present on any topic of interest.

I’ve put forward a presentation proposal Designing and Building a Simple and Scalable Virtual Infrastructure with HP Flex-10 and ESX(i) which is the ONLY HP Flex-10 related presentation proposal.

As there are many more presentation proposals than available slots, the options are put to a public vote so YOU get to decide what you want to see at VMWorld.

If HP Flex-10 and ESX(i) is of interest to you, please vote for my session. You will need a VMworld logon and click on the thumbs up icon against any sessions that interest you, hopefully mine!

Title: Designing and Building a Simple and Scalable Virtual Infrastructure with HP Flex-10 and ESX(i)

Technical Level: Technical

Abstract: No one is downsizing their virtual infrastructure. Your virtual hosting environment is the one place in your IT department where you are not looking at making anything smaller. The benefits of virtualisation in managing costs by making better use of resources, improving availability by increased uptime and simplifying and standardising on your IT processes means you need to virtualise more and more. Using HP blades is a great foundation to build and expand your virtual infrastructure enabling you to create your own private or public cloud. HP Flex-10 delivers 10GbE to each blade and using VMware’s advanced converged networking capabilities allows you to provide IP Storage, VM Traffic, vMotion and FT to your infrastructure in a simple yet scalable way. Understanding and designing your infrastructure for HP Flex-10 can seem daunting, frustrating and confusing with too many options along with ever changing firmware and Nic driver version requirements. “Designing and building a simple and scalable virtual infrastructure with HP Flex-10 and ESX(i)” will show you how to configure your blade environment, what firmware versions you require and how to build your ESX(i) hosts with PowerCLI to take advantage of 10GbE converged networking.

I’ve been served on vSoup!

January 25th, 2011 2 comments

I was honoured to be invited as the first guest on vSoup.net joining Chris Dearden (@chrisdearden), Ed Czerwin (@eczerwin) and Christian Mohn (@h0bbel) talking about virtualisation

We spoke about managing virtual desktops, VDI, HP Flex-10 switches and firmware issues, storage and plently of other things!

You can download the podcast from vsoup.net or even better subscribe through iTunes.

The start of something…

July 28th, 2010 No comments

Hello and welcome to my blog.  I’ve been a taker for far too many years, happily using and leeching from others so I’ve finally decided its time to try my hand at contributing.

So…who am I?

I’m a freelance IT consultant living and working in London as an enterprise infrastructure architect, designing and building the interconnected computer related stuff people use every day. I currently work in a global financial organisation peddling my ideas to anyone who will listen.

I work mainly on virtualisation and Windows Server and surrounding technology projects with some storage, networking, desktop, scripting in the mix and also plently of other bits and pieces thrown in for fun.

I started many moons ago in IT, the bug bit big time while I was playing with computers at school and has only grown!  I’ve written some programs used by actual people, worked as a do everything IT person and played as an IT manager.  I’ve done support, delved into technical project management and now try my luck at plenty of engineering / design / architecture (all the same thing I think).

I have a passion for putting together systems that are simple, flexible and scalable regardless of their size and thought it was about time I put down my thoughts and ideas….so thanks for stopping by.

Categories: Blog Tags: