DevOps & Automation Aplenty at DTW 2023 - the olden days of yore are no more! It is time for another IT Ops evolution.

Conference planning time. Cancel all vacations and bring gifts to the “gods of agile” that the next planned major announcement(s) would be ready for the big debut! From sessions to demos to labs to on-stage demos to meetings to color schemes to PowerPoints and on and on – the Boston Marathon to conference “go time” can be exhilarating, tearful (heartbreak hill), and in my opinion – the ultimate culmination of ideas taken to flight! Personally, I have survived many cyclical rounds of the November to May ramp-up to goal and as I get ready to embark on Dell Technologies World 2023, I find myself reminiscing about the big moments I have had the privilege to be a part of and witness. And witness.

Some of us who started our IT Ops at the end of the 20th century (the year 1999 for Gen Z in the back) have been a party to not just typical conference flair and fun but to leading innovations in data center transitions. Some highlights I can think of that really enabled our customers’ businesses to grow fast alongside their data were:

• Launch of Symmetrix DMX [2003] which introduced the first Direct Matrix Architecture eliminating the switch and bus-based architecture moving I/O delivery through disk and global memory directors
• Consolidation of edge storage area network switches into Core to Edge topologies and the dramatic battle amongst Brocade, McData, and Cisco for real estate among the arrays and hosts [2005-2006]
• Landing virtual upper ground with the acquisitional merger of VMware [2003] and the release of VMAX [2009] introducing the Virtual Matrix Architecture supporting scale-out architecture and “hundreds of thousands of terabytes and millions of IOPS”[1]
• Complimenting and rounding out the environment necessitate the addition of Backup and Recovery Services through more acquisitions with Avamar [2006] and Data Domain [2009]
• Launching all-flash arrays through XtremIO building more momentum in a highly competitive space, keeping the data center from collapsing on the weight itself [2012]
• And with Dell, imagining the entirety of end-to-end solutions becomes infinitely more cohesive.
• Fast forward to the APEX launch in May of 2021 where the cloud becomes more accessible, and as-a-service becomes tangible.

Looking back is fun and you can start to see patterns of innovation and evolution, they are truly transformative, and they parallel the lines of scale, performance, and continuous efficiencies intended for the customer data center. But these more specifically on-premises evolutions have always had the same dynamics attached to them. Disruptive and challenging introductions of agile development to increase business outputs, lack of centralized management tools, continuous resource skills and training needs, security risks, and the list of barriers to organizational fluidity continues, and THEN public cloud availability is introduced in the mix. (Run on sentence AND out of breath)

How does anyone organization keep up? ?

Stand by, we have this year’s DTW, and it is going to be EPIC. I am so excited about what is coming and looking forward to the reactions of our customers. It is different in so many ways. The marketing team, product managers, engineers, and executives are setting a tone and a mood. I can tell you that it feels different. Not to mention, it is in a different location and at a different time this year by a few weeks. And if you’ve made it this far into the blog you know that everything must change. (IYKYK) ?

This means the habitual rites I do every year at the Sands Expo and Palazzo must change. No more of the same old patterns. Do you know what else makes a pattern? Repeated manual processes and procedures. Since this blog is about transitions, what about the transition from manual IT Ops to automation and DevOps?

And many of you, milestones of change have been a part of your IT careers. From running network cables under tiles to moving applications to the cloud, digital transformation to intelligent innovation, and driving up and accelerating your business outcomes, this could be your year to plan the ultimate milestone.

• As IT operations managers or DevOps leaders - what does your milestone look like?
• At a very basic level, infrastructure automation to meet CI/CD workflow efficiency?
• Is it motivating your teams to get more training and skills in automation?
• What about handling automation, and streamlining business needs by priority and at scale?
• Are you frustrated by the lack of trust between application developers and IT administrators?
• Feeling overwhelmed by business demands, agile development, rogue cloud deployments eating away costs, and a growing number of toolchain sprawl?

At a minimum, one of the areas I can share ahead of DTW 2023 is our DevOps and Automation focus areas. Specifically, we do have a really great list of sessions that are geared toward learning more about how to incorporate automation tools into your operations, reducing those manual procedures starting with storage for example, and expanding throughout the organization. We have a customer story with ANZ Bank on Wednesday, 3:00 pm [Session 1518P-1] that breaks down how they drove an automation mentality into their organization and locked in their processes by doing their provisioning and self-service management with Ansible and ServiceNow. Beforehand, you can hit the ground running with Ask-the-Experts first thing Monday morning at 8:30 am [ATE 1818P] and learn how Dell helps customers on their automation journey and the experience of our experts in the industry.

So, my musings won’t end there. If you want to hear more, visit us in the Multicloud and as-a-Service space during the Expo times. Or we can just sit back and talk about the olden days when technologists fell from the sky and our storage systems could walk and talk. See you there!

[1] Dell EMC VMAX - Wikipedia