Hello World

It’s been in the back of my mind to write a blog, as with everything else that gets done, I’ve decided to make the time.

“Why is it time to give something back publicly?”

 

For many years,  I along with every other IT engineer on the planet, has made use of other people’s writings or musings through whatever medium was available at the time. Let’s be honest, you only know what you know, you learn from exposure and sometimes playing about with technology isn’t enough. Often time can be a constraint and this is when people turn to forums, blogs, help sections or whatever else can be garnered from a google search in time of need or interest.  I now feel it is time I gave something back because I feel I have benefited so much from the writings of others.  To this end, I have decided another way I can give something back to the community publicly outside of internal assistance, is to share my findings via a blog.  I have no idea what will end up here, it could be a VDI solution I am working on or a Firewall mechanism used in work via a change or project.  One thing I know will feature regularly is my love of virtualisation, storage, backups & networking.

 

“Why?”

 

Running VMs and making them available.  Day to day I am lucky enough to be part of an amazing team and culture in Novosco. We are an agile MSP headquartered in Belfast, Northern Ireland with a few other offices dotted around the UK and Ireland servicing everything from NHS Trusts to Housing Associations, Premiership Football clubs and more.  I wanted to join Novosco because of what I could see from the outside a few years ago, on the inside, it’s been even better.  Novosco really support engineers putting you through any certification you want to sit that is featured anywhere in the company’s product / tool set.  They give us a test lab to play with technology, over 1 TB of RAM and enough cores to build something meaty, flash storage and proper SAS drives to boot, with 40gbit per host networking.  Whilst this might not appeal to some, having a playground can be a gateway to deeper understanding and for me, that’s what it’s all about. Understanding, knowing and dare I say loving the technology I get exposed too, day in, day out.  When you couple a great company, great people, great culture and engineers with passion, under a management team with real vision, the sky is the limit.  I can honestly say for me personally, none of this would be possible without internal colleagues and the people who make the time to write articles, blogs, how to guides, forum answers etc etc etc.

“What do I do?”

 

My day job centres around providing solutions & support to our larger enterprise clients in London and further afield.  Daily toolset & some of the technologies I am certified in include,  in no particular order:

  • Virtualisation – VMware
  • Networking – Cisco / Huawei / MPLS
  • Storage – EMC / vSAN / Others
  • Backups & Replication – Veeam Availability / Zerto
  • Firewalls – Fortinet & Cisco ASA
  • MS Stack – AD and anything below or above up in the cloud

 

“Who cares?”

 

Honestly, I do not know, let’s see what happens.  If my musings help in any way, and I hope they will, let me know, either way I’ll keep on rambling, feedback is as important here for me as it is anywhere else in my day job.

 

“Coffee?”

 

How good, is good coffee? It’s great!

 

-Craig Rodgers

Technical Architect  @ http://www.novosco.com