Virtualization
The order I read a Broadcom renewal quote in
Most people open the VMware renewal at the total. That number is the last thing you should look at, and by then you have already lost the argument.
Infrastructure, written down while it is still true.
I size data centre and AI platforms for a living, in Algiers. These are the notes I wish someone had handed me before the meeting: what the numbers really say, where the vendor tool is quietly helping itself, and what breaks in month four.
Recent
All 11 articlesNutanix is not a drop-in for vSphere, and pretending otherwise costs you month four
AHV will run your VMs. That was never the risky part. The risk is in the twenty things around the VM that you forgot were vSphere features.
What OpenShift Virtualization quietly asks of your storage team
KubeVirt runs VMs inside pods. That sentence hides an entire storage conversation that most migration plans discover in the pilot.
An RVTools export is not an assessment
Everybody starts with the same spreadsheet. Almost nobody reads the twelve columns that change the answer, and every vendor tool quietly fills the gaps in its own favour.
What a GPU node costs before it produces a single token
The accelerators are the headline. Power, cooling, fabric, storage and the eighteen weeks of waiting are the budget.
Nobody sizes the fabric, then blames the GPUs
East-west traffic in an AI cluster behaves nothing like the enterprise traffic your network was designed for. The symptom looks like slow accelerators.
Indexing 604 pages of recitation with Whisper and a lot of fuzzy matching
A weekend project that taught me more about applied AI than any vendor deck: transcription is the easy half, alignment is the real problem, and the human in the loop is not a failure.
RAG is a retrieval problem wearing an AI costume
Nine out of ten disappointing RAG systems are disappointing search systems. The generation step is rarely where the failure is.
NVMe/TCP quietly won the mid-range while everyone argued about Fibre Channel
Not because it is faster. Because it removed a team, a skill set and a second network from the build sheet.
Your immutable backup is not an air gap
Both words get used as though they mean the same protection. They do not, and the difference is the credential that can reach the repository.
What I write about
All topicsAI infrastructure
GPUs, fabrics, power, and the parts nobody sizes.
Applied AI
Things I actually built and what broke.
Virtualization
VMware, AHV, KubeVirt, and life after the renewal.
Storage
Arrays, protocols, latency, and honest numbers.
Cloud
Where it pays off and where it quietly does not.
Security
Recovery, immutability, identity, exposure.
Platform
Kubernetes, OpenShift, and the operating model.