Adventures of a Technical MasterMind

Over the last week, I have been testing the CA Server management and CMDB product, as well as Bladelogic. Both products are good, but have their downsides. I am evaluating 4 products, and narrowing it down to 2 in order to deploy on a real QA/staging environment. The criteria we are testing on are as follows, each has a weight as well. More later: Requirement Sub-Feature Network Option Track network device configuration Create policy for configuration standards CMDB Visualize relationships between servers Visualize relationships between server and network Track dependencies of servers and websites Software Deployment Support for MSI, RPM, and Sun Packages GUI for creating Packages Search and replace Reverse engineer files into packages Rollback Notifications via SNMP and SMTP Download patches, deploy, and rol...

I've been really absorbed in my BI project. The problem is that one of my tools is really fast, but requires a lot of development and building. The other tool is REALLY slow, because its runs all of its queries on demand. They told me they can fix it by pre aggregating like the other tool does. Hopefully it will, but you never know.

I have a lot of things going on including POCs with CA, Bladelogic, and Opsware to deal with asset management (displacing another tool) configuration management, centralized credential management, and deployment. By testing these main areas we can figure out which product we want to deploy on around 4,000-5,000 of our servers. We need a better handle on change and configuration. It will improve the quality of our products and make reporting changes and noncompliance easier across the board. We will be able to fix things faster.

Sorry about my missing in action. I have been ignoring my blog and working a lot on finalizing my POCs with the BI vendors. I am paying attention again to my blog and will be writing more. Just got back from 2 days in NYC. Here I sit in my office on Friday night at about 7pm.