We just concluded a massive week of technology launches, media briefings, customer meetings and world class thought leadership in Las Vegas at Dell EMC World. Having been to many EMC Worlds, this event was bigger, badder (in a good way) and more fun than anything I have seen before. Here are my top 10 highlights:

10. The products launches were on a scale unheard of. If you went to the event expecting one product update, or a few feature enhancements then you would have been blown away by how almost every product line was enhanced, and the innovation didn’t just stop at technology. It included innovations and launched in= solutions, services and new consumption models. We announced new platforms around Azure stack (hybrid cloud to extend out to Azure). Continue reading 10 Highlights Of Dell EMC World 2017 →

“Enterprise DevOps Adoption Isn’t Mandatory, But Neither IS Survival”

                                        …….Gene Kim in the Wall Street Journal

There has been a lot of talk about disruption in 2015. A big theme in 2016 will be the disruption of the IT professional. Every role in IT will change and the pace at which we learn new concepts, skills and models will be important for success for anyone in IT. This post should help you get your head around some of the changes coming.

Continue reading Books To Read This Summer →

Starting on Monday the 30th November we have an exciting week lined up at EMC in Sydney with a bunch of activities. We will have Jonas Rosland and Matt Cowger visiting from the US to drive a week of great discussion around DevOps, 3rd platform and all things cloud native.

If you feel line joining us, here are three activities that are taking place.

• Tuesday the 1st December at 6:00pm we will be sponsoring a Docker meetup. Venue is at iCentral (the start society) in Sydney CBD. Register here.
• On Wednesday 2nd December you can eat DevOps for breakfast – this is a customer focussed breakfast session at the Sofitel Wentworth hotel from 7:30. Contact EMC for an invite.
• If you feel like a beer and a laugh, on Thursday 3rd December at 4pm  we will be recording a pubcast at the Glenmore hotel in Sydney and we need an audience. Register here: DevOps Pubcast

It will be an interesting and action packed week.

Let me start by saying that the ideas discussed here are my own, and not necessarily that of my employer (EMC). This is my own personal blog.

A great article by Andrew Oliver has been doing the rounds called “Never ever do this to Hadoop”. Andrew argues that the best architecture for Hadoop is not external shared storage, but rather direct attached storage (DAS). The article can be found here: http://www.infoworld.com/article/2609694/application-development/never–ever-do-this-to-hadoop.html

I want to present a counter argument to this. Now having seen what a lot of companies are doing in this space, let me just say that Andrew’s ideas are spot on, but only applicable to traditional SAN and NAS platforms. There is a new next generation storage architecture that is taking the Hadoop world by storm (pardon the pun!). EMC has done something very different which is to embed the Hadoop filsyetem (HDFS) into the Isilon platform. This approach changes every part of the Hadoop design equation.

Continue reading Never ever do this to Hadoop…..unless you are using Isilon →

Ok, here is an issue I have been struggling with for a while and finally came across a fix. When installing Pivotal Cloud Foundry for a second or third time, often the installation will drop out on the step “creating director user” with the following error:

Target already set to `microbosh-b5f7fa48777480cf307e’ {“type”: “step_finished”, “id”: “microbosh.logging_into_director”} {“type”: “step_started”, “id”: “microbosh.creating_director_user”}

Running bosh login director f539d3aebcc43dc2d2f0 Continue reading Pivotal CF Install Issue: Cannot log in as `admin’ →

Here’s another little issue that I couldn’t find any documentation on, but managed to work around. When installing Pivotal CF v1.2.0.0 or v1.2.2.0 I received the following message:

Error 30002: Extracting release archive failed. Check task debug log for details.

The fix I found (after trying a few other options) was to remove everything related to Pivotal CF, including all VMs, templates and delete the Pivotal Ops manager console VMs. Make sure you delete left over VMs that could be on disk somewhere.

Then do a full re-install using Pivotal Ops manager install file pcf-1.2.0.0.ova and using elastic runtime version cf-1.2.1.0.pivotal.

The 1.2.1 version seemed to fix this for me.

Make sure you start from the beginning with the install of the OVA file. A partial reinstall with version 1.2.1 did not work for me.

If you can’t find a copy of this version then leave a comment below. Also, if this happens to help you leave a comment.