There are a lot of automation tools available today. One of those I've really enjoyed working with is Ansible. Read more...

Over the years I've looked at dozens of content management systems. A lot of them are very good. Some are very simple and others very complex with a ton of plug-ins and modules. Others are very easy to theme, but more difficult to access the backend. And the opposite is true with some having easy backend/database access, but limited theming capabilities. I've found few that have a good balance of complexity to feature set. Read more...

Redis as a data structures server makes it very easy to create, store and report on many aspects of an infrastructure. We'll take a look at how this could be used with one example from a Storage/SAN environment. I'm going to use Perl and the Redis module in the examples, but this could very easily be done in any other favorite scripting language. I'm also going to assume data has already been collected from the various sources. There are lots of ways to do this, CLI, REST, SMI-S, third party tools, vendor tools just to name a few options. Read more...

Redis has quickly become one of my favorite NOSQL databases. It's much more than a key-value store. It's self-described as a data structures server. It stores several types of structures, lists, sets, sorted sets, hashes and more. Learn more about Redis and data types here. Read more...