Allow me to introduce myself

The year is 2017, and while some days I tire of this, many of my days in the system administration battlefield are quite satisfying. I hope to share here some of the learning and wisdom I've obtained across the years, and my thoughts on being productive in this field.

Woody Guthrie once said "Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.". I'm definitely not a genius but I appreciate that statement and always look for ways to deploy something in such way that is simplest to operate, manage and reproduce.

I'll be focusing on the following subjects in future posts:

- System and storage provisioning
- Monitoring
- Automation, configuration, and deployment
- Business Intelligence
- Data Protection and Business Continuity Planning
- Project Management
- ITIL and documentation
- Data management

I have considerable experience working with the following products:

- Physical Server: Sun/Oracle, Dell, HP, SImplivity
- SAN and Storage: Hitachi AMS/HUS, HPE 3PAR, Netapp, Brocade & FOS
- Virtual infrastructure: VMware, Oracle VM Server, Solaris Zones
- Data Protection: Veeam, Netbackup, BackupExec, Oracle RMAN, rsync
- Monitoring: Zabbix, Nagios, OpManager, Cacti, Stor2RRD
- Business Intelligence: Splunk, Metabase, Graylog, Oracle Apex
- Automation: Ansible, Puppet
- Database Platforms: Oracle EE and XE, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Ingres, AWS RDS, Redshift, SQL Server
- Operating Systems: Solaris to 11.3, RedHat to 7.4
- Volume Managers: Veritas VxVM, SVM, LVM, ZFS
- Development: Perl, Python, PLSQL, HTML, CGI, GIT
- Security: Addressing Qualys and Symantec scan reports, SOX, CIS, PCI compliance

I’m particularly fond of these maturing open source treasures:

- Kanboard (kanban project management)
- Zabbix (monitoring)
- Ansible (automation)
- Metabase (business intelligence)
- Stor2RRD (SAN and Array graphing)

I hope you get something out of these posts, and please feel free to provide your comments and feedback.

Chris.