Data Center Overlords

For the past 15 years in data center work, you have either been a network admin, a server admin, storage admin, developer, etc. We were pretty silo’d, and the walls between the various career tracks were well defined and solid.

Today, the lines are blurring. We have switches inside of servers (i.e., VMware’s vswitch), servers inside of switches (Cisco’s UCS, HP’s Virtual Connect), storage sitting on a network (Fibre Channel), and developers programming switches (devops).  Dogs and cats living together (mass hysteria).

The old silo’d approach is collapsing, and it’s becoming more and more difficult to be just one of anything. That’s what this blog is about: the new role, combining knowledge of server administration, virtualization, storage networking, networking, and more. It’s not even a specialization, it’s a requirement to keep everything from flying apart.   This blog is about the issues we all face, as well as what it takes to keep up with the explosion of emerging technologies (virtualization, VDI, FCoE, TRILL, VEPA/VN-LINK, and about 400 new 802.1xxx standards).

We’ve had cracks in the silos for years. The first technology that I ran across that really started to blur the lines was the load balancer. They straddled the world between servers and networks, as well as application development. Load balancers started out as simple Layer 4 devices, but have become a who industry of their own, with devops, protocol awareness, control languages, and more.

But virtualization has brought it all crashing down.  And that’s why we’re here.

We are The Data Center Overlords.