Stuart Burns

This Damn War Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. It's a law most IT people would understand and perhaps even fear. It was my third day as the new network manager for a reasonably sized estate across several sites, most inhabited by weirdy beardies who had jobs like counting bats, frogs and other animals you may never have heard of. It …

Up until relatively recently, VMware’s vCenter was a Windows-only affair. With version 5 came the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) based on a hardened Linux installation. It essentially left behind the legacy issues around management and patching (and all manner of other issues) that impact Windows. The next major release of …

At a client site recently, we had to investigate why the upgrade from VMware vSphere 6.0 to 6.5 had gone wrong in that the normally rock-solid environment was a bit ill – to say the least. On-site conversation ran something along the lines of: “It’s up.” “Hang on...” “It’s down.” “Webservices say: ‘No’.” Cue PSC reboots, …

Scripting is now the first choice for clued-up administrators who want to get things done quickly and in an automated fashion. However, scripting does bring its own set of issues. One only need look here or here to feel the pain. Software-defined data centres exist purely in code (obviously with hardware underneath) so to help …

Sponsored We can all agree that endpoint security is important – and also that it is a pain to enforce. Because of people. Worker carelessness is the most potent threat to endpoint security, according to US IT decision makers. When defending against malware there are well-established routines including obvious items such as using …

Yes, cloud might be the future but what truths lie hidden beneath this rock of certainty? You've heard the hype, pros and cons, but there's plenty the average cloud user may not have considered in the clamour to get up there. Our company recently heeded the cloud's call, and this is what we discovered. Where cloud excels is …

Like it or not, the cloud in all forms is approaching at great speed, irrespective of your employer's size. All sysadmins need to get onboard or be left behind. Me? After 17 years working in a range of environments, I did at one point believe I had ages before the cloud arrived at large-scale enterprises like the one where I'm …

Blog Everyone I speak to about system security seems to panic about malware, cloud failure system crashes and bad patches. But the biggest threat isn’t good or bad code, or systems that may or may not fail. It’s people. What we call Liveware errors range from the mundane to the catastrophic and they happen all the time at all levels …

Have you ever bothered to look at who your browser trusts? The padlock of a HTTPS connection doesn't mean anything if you can't trust the other end of the connection and its upstream signatories. Do you trust CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Centre). What about Turkistan trust or many other “who are they” type …

Sure, we've all heard about "microservices" but just what use are they and why would you want them? How do you even start designing microservices? Most applications built more than a couple a years ago would more than likely use classic application design methodology that is monolithic in nature, i.e. everything is bundled …

There's growing interest in VMware’s Photon. Essentially, Photon lets highly optimised Docker containers into VMware Land. One of the great things about deploying Docker is that it can take mere seconds to spin up a new instance. Photon can be thought of as a competitor to CoreOS and similar offerings. What is different about …

Comment Some time has passed since my first article on the subject of being an Aspie in the work world. So, I thought it may be time to cover a subject closer to my heart, namely being an Aspie in social settings. Work, after all, isn’t just about what you do – it’s how you interact with people as well. First, let's start with my wife …

There’s a lot of hype around data scientists. You can blame big data and the cloud. Data scientists are lauded, hunted and positively desired by those wanting to squeeze the most from their information. In accordance with such demand come large salaries – the average is $123,000 in the US. Like the Yanks of WWII, data …

Server farm deployment used to be a simple enough process. Sometimes it was manual, sometimes it was automated. The odd shell script here or there, or some basic file manipulation was the order of the day along with PXE and other automation tools. It was workable at best. As virtualisation technology matured, so did the …

If the Ashley Madison saga has taught us one thing – well, many things, but one main thing – it was never, ever, ever use a work email account for personal pursuits online. Once trawled, data from the leaked site revealed that thousands of those with Ashley Madison accounts – presumably men, given the site’s overwhelming …

In a post-Snowden world most IT people are painfully aware that most of us would not win a fight against a well-funded organisation, or government, that wants the data on your network, laptop or device. When someone is targeted by such an entity, they won’t go for the ever-popular “spooks” style secret bugging or custom zero- …

Comment Windows 10 is the last version of Windows that will ever be released. If this really is the last version of Windows desktop operating system ever, though, where will Microsoft make its money? Microsoft, after-all, has built a multi-billion-dollar business on sales of new versions of Windows through retailers and to PC makers, …

Throughout my career I have seen many Windows releases with minimum requirements that were a little bit deceiving. Sure, the machines would boot, but you would sometimes have enough time to brew a fresh pot of coffee before the computer was in a usable state. That usable state excluded any applications you wanted to run on top …

Comment Summer is here and IT bods can rejoice because if users aren’t already on their annual two-week holiday then those remaining – the ones with kids – will be soon once schools break up in mid July. It’s the time of year when the heavy lifting side (physical or virtual) of infrastructure upgrades can be done without pesky users …

Visit a British air show before September and it's possible you’ll get the opportunity to witness the last Vulcan bomber in flight - and this is definitely the last year you'll get the chance, this time. Alongside the staple leather-clad wing-walking ladies, the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight, simulated Apache attack- …

Managers and customers love statistics and metrics. Companies can live or die by how good their metrics are and the potential penalties for failing to meet the required service levels as defined in agreements. It can also be: “Have my team met their SLA” or: “What is the uptime on the server farm”. The dictionary defines the …

Backup is a fundamental component of a healthy infrastructure. I admit backups are neither cutting edge nor sexy but they are important. It is an often-quoted statistic that of the companies that suffer serious data loss, one third go out of business within three years. Actually, it’s worse than that: 94 per cent of companies …

Server virtualisation in its current state is pretty much done. The market is mature and critical tier one workloads are absolutely at home on tier one virtualised platforms such as VMware and HyperV. Virtualisation tends to be a very useful technology in larger organisations for what most administrators would say are the wrong …

Unlike most of its rivals, Apple is primarily a hardware company which also happens to make the operating system and application delivery platform, taking a cut from the sales of software and media that others create for its platform. Mass laptop and desktop management is not really what Apple does; it lets others fill this void …

Now that virtualisation is seen as a robust and mature technology, managers and administrators are looking to reduce server deployment and management costs further. One area of potential cost reduction is reclaiming unused or under-utilised infrastructure capacity. Most virtual estates that have grown organically over the …