Josh Stephens's Most Recent Posts

There's a lot of talk right now in the industry about big data and the business intelligence applications that are being used to wrangle it. However, very few people are talking about the impact that big data can have on the network.

What stood out to me about The Avengers themselves was how dysfunctional they were as a team early on and how they remedied that quickly enough to save the earth. Here are five key things that we as IT professionals can learn from this team.

Last week I was out in Washington D.C. presenting at Geek Day. It's a trade show and networking event focused on IT professionals (geeks) in both the public and private sectors. As you would imagine, I couldn't resist the opportunity to do some live polling while I had a captive audience.

Last week I spoke at Data Center World out in Las Vegas. During my presentation we talked a lot about data center expertise within specific technical areas like VoIP, virtualization, and power management. How to find and validate experts in these areas seemed to at the forefront of everyone's minds.

Many times when we think about what makes a good network administrator, we limit our thinking to technical knowledge. Do they understand Ethernet? Do they have a firm grasp of 802.11? Can they make practical use of the OSI Model? Yet, it's often the soft skills that make or break us in the end.

I was working behind the scenes at a large tradeshow recently, and I was asked to give a group of executives a tour of the NOC. As I was demonstrating the network management tools, I started getting text messages from the system that we were having wireless issues. Turns out that one of the attendees for the show had a bad Wi-Fi card and everywhere that user roamed it caused the wireless router to spike to 100% CPU and reboot, knocking off all of the other users.

Virtualization technologies have dramatically changed the way that we think about servers and computing resources in general; this is common knowledge among most technologists and especially with system administrators. However, many engineers fail to realize that these technologies have also created significant changes to our networks.

Unless you're a network security or IT security professional, hearing the word "compliance" probably makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. It's sort of like when you realized that Bruce Willis was dead at the end of The Sixth Sense - you suspected something was wrong for a while but now your dread has come to life.

The subject of personally-owned mobile devices like tablets and smartphones being used on the corporate network is a hot one. I posted about it here, but it's a much wider issue than I covered in that piece. Many companies are concerned about the proliferation of personally-owned devices showing up in the workplace and are now in the process of developing and deploying mobile device policies and technologies to help enforce them.

At home you have a little more control over whether or not to allow guests and their new, Random Array of Personal Wireless Devices (RAPWD - yeah, I just made that up) to access your 802.11 network. Personally, when I'm visiting someone and they won't allow me to access their wireless network I consider it on par with not allowing me to access their bathroom.

The primary purpose of most IT management tools is to identify problems within your IT systems. Whether the problem is a down server or WAN link, a saturated fiber channel or trunk port, an Exchange store or SAN queue backing up or etc - the jobs of the IT tools are to detect these issues and to help you resolve them. However, sometimes these tools are used to forensically analyze system performance for a specific time in history; and when they are, things can get pretty interesting.

We recently hosted a survey on the value of IT certifications. Based on the survey results, IT certifications are more valuable than any other time that I can remember and folks with these certifications are seeing a return on their time investments. Insider (registration required)

Now that Halloween is behind us, we have officially entered into the "Holiday Season." That can mean anything from "hands off everything" to "time to get those special projects done" depending on which industry that you're in. If you want to use this time to get some projects accomplished, I have a few suggestions.

One of my biggest pet peeves is being told that I can't do something, or more specifically, that something can't be done. As soon as you throw a statement like that at me, you can bet your bottom dollar that all I'm thinking about is how I can go about proving you wrong.

In many organizations, virtualization technology is managed by the systems team, the data center team, or a specialized virtualization team. Seldom do I see network teams responsible for the virtual layer. This makes sense, but it can make managing the network requirements around virtualization difficult.