Infrastructure Architecture in the modern world

Infrastructure architecture is a vast and deep topic.  Much of our day to day lives in IT are driven by previous decisions in this area.  How do I backup my system?  What types of servers can I order for my project?  What version of OS am I allowed to use?  These are all generally dictated by the infrastructure that has been chosen in your company, data center, or IT shop.

As DBA's and application admins we ask why can't I backup my system faster?  Why can't I bring in a new server or storage technology?  Why doesn't my system work just like the powerpoint diagram the vendor gave me?

Well the answer is the architecture, the standards set forth and the technology choices we have at hand.  Often these rules and choices are dictated by much bigger business forces and decisions, not really for technical reasons.  How much investment budget does the company have at hand to change from one vendor to another?  How will the existing staff adapt to the new technology?  Will the technology work for everything in the data center?  Not just one database, one technology, or one application?

Over the years I've had conversations like this with many experienced IT professional both in my company and at conferences.  These topics are deep, and no one answer is right.  The reality depends on the company, the size of the teams, the size of the budgets, the ability for teams to understand and change, and many other factors.

This year at Collaborate I'm pleased to be working with industry experts and Oracle ACE's.  Join myself along with Tariq Farooq, Kirby McCord, Arup Nanda, and Kia Yu as we try to discuss this topic in a two hour panel session Thursday at 3:00 in Lido 3105 and also with IOUG Plug in to Vegas.

Since these topics can often get sided with the limits we have in our daily jobs, our session will use a fake company made up for the discussion.  We will talk about the options of engineered systems, virtualization, commodity hardware, and external clouds.  Why choose these architectures, and what some of the impacts on future business decisions would be.

Hope to see you there.

Collaborate 14 #C14LV

So to say this year has been hectic would be an understatement.  But here it is April already and time once again for the IOUG, Quest, and OAUG user group conference.  I mentioned in my opening blog post that in the old days there were no separate groups to send tickets to and there were not experts to run to.  Well that was not 100% true, the experts were not generally in the same company you were.

The experts were out in the field at other companies.  There was no internet to search for them, or social sites like linked in to find them.  As a
long time member of IOUG I have always been grateful for generosity of experts that have fought their way into learning, and then share their experiences.

I've been a member of IOUG for about 17 of their 21 years, and a volunteer for the last 8.  Being a member of IOUG has allowed me to work with and meet some of the most talented people in the Oracle community.  These are not opportunities you get by just posting to a blog, or talking to people only in your company.

So get out, be involved, and be a member.

With that in mind, sorry to the IOUG staff that I'm so late with this post, it has been a hard year. For those of you I'll see over this next week at Collaborate, please say hi, please pull me aside and grab some of my time.  It's a very busy week, but do reach out, and do connect.

I'm the lead of the development track this year, so for those of you that submitted proposals, thank you.  Even if you didn't get selected, thank you for sharing and keep trying.  We have a limited number of slots and we try our best to have a diverse and talented set of speakers for our audiences.  For the 17 of you that were selected and are presenting, if I don't get a chance to say hello or thank you in person, thank you for presenting and sharing your knowledge.

I'm also the associate editor for the IOUG magazine SELECT Journal.  So for all of you that are presenting, or submitted proposals, please consider authoring an article.  We are also looking for new authors and great article ideas.  This is your opportunity to be published in a industry leading magazine, that is peer reviewed.  Like a professor getting published in a scientific journal, we take this very seriously and we appreciate every submission.

I've also been asked to help with the new Solaris Special Interest Group (SIG) in IOUG.  For those of you in the SIG, I'll see you on Thursday and we discuss what is next for the SIG and I can decide if I can help out or not.

To Arup, Tariq, Kia, and Kirby; thanks for volunteering to help with our panel discussion on Thursday.  We should have a great two hours discussion infrastructure architecture and how it impacts the business.  From cloud, to engineered systems, virtualization and commodity hardware.  I'm expecting a heated but fun discussion on the larger impact of these items, not just the marketing hype.

And for everyone else going to the conference, have fun, learn a lot and got to at least one session out of your comfort zone.  if your a developer, go to a project management meeting.  If you are a DBA, go to a developer meeting, if you are a manager, go to a DBA tuning sessions.  Learn something that you never would have learned had you not come to Collaborate 14.
See you in Vegas.

COLLABORATE 14 has 1,250+ sessions, 5,000+ top Oracle users and lots of other cool events. Join me at #C14LV! http://bit.ly/19P4l0W @ioug

So it begins

So I'm starting off my new blog, in the world of millions of blogs.  It's been a hectic year, and this initial post is somewhat late.

Let me start with a little background, I've been working with computer and IT technology my whole life, my first computer was a Tandy TRS-80 and I've been lucky enough to work with many people that have experiences that pre-date even that.  But needless to say, I grew up in computers and I come from a background of having to make everything work.  There was no separate group you sent a ticket to, or another expert to call.

In this carer I've worked with Oracle products for about 23 years now, starting with Oracle database version 6.  In the vein of database administration I've built, setup and managed almost every possible technology that is required to use a database.  Inclusive of storage, network, server, directories, operating system, backup, clients, development tools, data modeling, data transfer tools and so on.

My roles in the last 12 years have really been in the areas of infrastructure and architecture for very large environments.  Support many databases simultaneously as well as very large or heavily used databases.  This includes everything from the power to the server up to the application working and deploying change controls for code changes.  I have also spent a lot of time doing performance tuning of applications from end to end, and working in very large global corporate environment.

So what's this blog going to contain, well in general things that fit into my background.  As you can see it could be just about anything in the IT corporate world, with an emphasis on Oracle technology.  But since Oracle has over 4,000 products now, I'm sure we won't run out of things to discuss.  There will probably be the occasional mention to beer, as that is one of my favorite hobbies.  But I'll try to remain focused.

See you in the inter-webs.