Will Your IT Organization Survive the Age of AWS?

falling anvil

By: Kent Erickson >> I recently pointed out that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the third-largest server vendor and may be first by next year. Should people in IT be concerned about where they buy their computer services? Yes. The big-three cloud providers are going to completely transform every single IT organization. It’s going to be ...

Getting Started With VMware NSX

VMware NSX Zenoss ZenPack

By: Kent Erickson >> We’re talking to many organizations that are beginning to use VMware NSX for software-defined networking. It looks like it can help VMware users simplify the provisioning of secure network services to data center applications. It’s pretty clear that network provisioning just hasn’t kept up with server provisioning. It’s easy to spin up ...

If You Can't Take the (DevOps) Heat, Stay Out of the (Test) Kitchen

chef logo

By: Andrew Kirch >> Virtualization and the cloud are changing how apps are deployed. Application orchestration and deployment is an order of magnitude more complex than ever before. IT operations staff members have been turned into virtual plumbers, ensuring all the bits of the underlying infrastructure are connected together properly and don’t leak. This is tedious ...

The Back-to-School Domino Effect

keyboard

Education lifts every aspect of our society and global economy — a mission we all need take as seriously as the institutions that manage the traditional and, now, online classrooms. The rise of the new digital classroom gives students and faculty unprecedented learning capabilities, putting high demands on the IT teams facing ever-increasing system complexity. With ...

Layer 2 Network Connection Awareness Improves Root Cause Analysis

application support sketch

By: Kent Erickson >> At the end of July, Zenoss delivered a customer feature straight from our Customer Advisory Board's requests. The Layer 2 ZenPack helps customers identify application and network root causes. Root cause analysis for application services can now automatically include supporting network switch faults. A huge cause of event floods has been eliminated, replaced ...

Response to CRN Interview With Chuck Robbins - August 2015

servers

By: Kent Erickson >> I recently read a great interview with the new CEO of Cisco, Chuck Robbins, on CRN.com. He touched on topics from ACI to IoT to channel partners. Recommended reading! ACI Led the Discussion It was exciting that Chuck led with a discussion on ACI. Zenoss is working with many organizations implementing policy-defined ...

Situation Analysis: Amazon is the Third Largest Server Vendor?

servers and virtual servers 2015 quarterly revenues pie chart

By: Kent Erickson >> Every quarter, Gartner Inc. puts out a report on server market share. I kept looking at it and thinking how it’s missing the point. What about virtual servers? What about AWS? How can we intelligently manage a data center if we don’t know about all the servers? I thought it would be fun ...

A Zenoss Insider’s Look at Scale Testing Using the Calculated Performance ZenPack

By: Kent Erickson >> It seems like every data center vendor makes a big deal about how their product scales. Helping customers deal with metrics and events from thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of interesting things is indeed a challenging problem. Promising scale is one thing – delivering it is another. Let’s ...