Conference Presentations

Getting Started with Hyper-V, SpiceWorld 2019

Frugal IT for Nonprofits, SpiceWorld 2018

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Cloud vs on-prem is no longer an either/or scenario

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"Fluffly Cloud 12"by CL0UDYDAY is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Cloud computing has become a standard in the industry with a wide range of solutions now being offered by large cash cows like AWS and Azure and many other smaller startup companies. However, recent data seems to indicate that some CIOs are having buyer's remorse. A survey by Nutanix, a cloud software company, found that a number of companies were migrating away from cloud back to on-premises solutions. One of the biggest reasons for this was that the long-term costs of operating a purely cloud environment were actually more expensive than an on-premises environment, even with the discounts that were offered by the cloud vendor.
This situation is not a huge surprise to me because on-premises hardware is a one-time capital expense (aside from support and utility costs) while cloud solutions require ongoing costs to maintain the subscription. Another potential difficulty with cloud arises when companies wish to mov…
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VMware vs Hyper-V

When it comes to virtualization, VMware and Hyper-V are probably the two industry leaders. While VMware is one of the oldest and has been around for over two decades, Hyper-V has greatly improved since its initial release with Windows Server 2008 R2. I've had the experience of working with both platforms at work and in my personal home server, so I want to share some of my experience of the pros and cons of each platform.
VMware VMware was founded in 1998 and is currently owned by Dell, Inc. Their main virtualization platform is vSphere which is a suite of products including, most notably, ESXi and vCenter. ESXi is the actual virtualization platform that runs on the host, and vCenter is the management platform that runs on a VM and allows the administrator to control all the VMware features via a web interface. Aside from the usual virtualization of servers, VMware has a number of advanced features including vMotion which allows live migration of virtual servers from one host to a…
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Three Steps to Successfully Implementing Change in IT

Leaders in the business world can typically be placed into one of two categories: innovators and maintainers. Innovators are those who are very forward thinking and always consider new ideas and methodologies to keep a business current and ahead of its competitors. Maintainers are those who respect the traditions and customs of an organization and are hesitant to implement change that would jeopardize them. When taken to their extremes, both leadership styles can be damaging to a company. So, what is the happy medium that allows IT Managers/Directors to make needed changes to infrastructure and policy while respecting the organization's cultural norms? Here are three steps from my experience to doing this successfully:

1. Determine if change is needed.
The most important thing to remember is that change should never be made for the sake of change. While it might sound exciting and innovative to migrate to a new product or platform, it may not be the right fit for that company. To c…
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