Today is my first day at Dell Technologies as an Advisory vArchitect!
Dear TinkerTry Readers:
Today, October 28th of 2019, is my very first day at Dell! To be more precise, I'm now an Advisory vArchitect at Dell Techologies, and I'm quite glad to finally be able to share the news.
As a 21-year IBM veteran with a background in datacenters and virtualization who pivoted to a storage Technical Advisor role a decade ago, and who got to enjoy the wild-ride ascendancy of vSAN as a VMware HCI SE, this is a pretty sweet new gig for me. I'm so happy to be here, and so grateful for the opportunity to talk about hardware more while traveling much less, focused on working with enterprise customers in my home state of Connecticut. Having the opportunity to work at the market leader in the datacenter is amazing. Note that Dell Technologies consists of Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, Secureworks, Virtustream and VMware, and my VMware experience will play a prominent role in my new responsibilities. More about my career here and here.
I'm already feeling quite at home after Day 1, with some great people I get to work with and some very speedy NVMe SSD sweetness care of Samsung under a comfortable and quiet Dell Latitude 5400 keyboard. The integrated pointing stick is reminiscent of the beloved TrackPoint I'm so accustomed to using, and the integrated fingerprint reader and Windows Hello camera (with a mechanical shutter!) will surely be handy. If you have a look at my Dell-related tweets, you'll soon realize I've actually been following Dell's innovation in servers and laptops for years.
My manager is Corey Ehrenwerth, and I sure am glad that I introduced myself to him at a VxRail event earlier this year. I also get to work with Sean Thulin now, both of us reporting to Corey. Corey and Sean may be familiar to those of you who attend VMUGs (and/or VTUGs) in New England, and I remember getting to know Sean way back at a VTUG Winter Warmer in 2013. I also remember his kindness offering to reserve a Cronut for me at the Boston VMUG back in 2015. He sure made me feel much more at home among the hundreds of strangers, and we've stayed in touch as our HCI-related careers have shifted and progressed.
Does this affect TinkerTry?
Of course you may wonder, how will this new job affect TinkerTry? In short, it shouldn't. I properly disclosed my site to Dell prior to joining. This site is still independent, featuring only my voice and opinions, not those of my employer. I will continue to look at all home lab options, regardless of who makes them. There may occasionally be work-related posts, but only when it makes sense to do so.
I'm looking forward to getting up to speed on all the things on my new laptop and new mobile apps, then diving in to the latest in Dell's vast portfolio of PowerEdge Servers and storage offerings. You may be surprised to learn that even when I was an IBMer I had the opportunity to deploy Dell PowerEdge Servers on several occasions, and I quite like that rich iDRAC life-cycle management functionality. I've also done some consulting work with some Dell PERC RAID controller customers as well. The leaps forward that 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors and now AMD EPYC Processors have made lately should make for some interesting times in the datacenters of our future, where Dell will continue to play a very prominent role.
OK, that's a wrap for today, time to tweet this news out, and update my profiles, then recharge all my batteries for day 2!
Oct 31 2019 Update
Turns out I'll be heading into NYC tomorow for some training at the lovely Two Penn Dell office. Here's a look around, a 1 minute overview of the facility that I was given permission to share.
Video
See also at TinkerTry
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Just started my next adventure in infrastructure IT at Pivot3 as an HCI Solutions Architect!
- Thank you IBM, for 21 amazing years!
