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2013

December

Project Managers as Value Role in IT
Cathleen Bonner

Responding to "urgent/non-important" IT requests takes time away from developing initiatives, completing complex operations, and evaluating hardware or software technologies. Given this ever-present aspect of IT, many departments believe that sysadmin, service desk, network, and security areas are the obvious priorities when increasing staff. However, if project management is valued as a staff position or as a portion of present staffing roles, projects will have the high visibility and accountability they deserve, plus the resources they need in order to be Done Right.
The fundamentals of project management (sponsors, stakeholders, resources, scope, methodology) and how they can be used to drive the strategic vision of IT departments can be transformative for a department and its staff.
This talk is not a tutorial about "how to be a project manager", instead, attendees will hear about how to advocate for and develop project management within their groups, completing projects despite the seemingly endless lists of things to do.
Cathleen Bonner has worked in IT at the Broad Institute for over a decade. She began in desktop support, shifted into research computing engagement, and now manages the project and portfolio team. Cathleen's goal has been to understand how to best synchronize the tricky triad of customer engagement, IT culture, and strategic vision to produce the best IT services possible. In her non-work time, she finds fulfillment by volunteering with the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, running, cooking and eating out, and traveling.

slides (PDF, 93KB)
slides (PPTX (powerpoint), 160KB)

September

Is the MooseFS distributed filesystem in your future?
Peter aNeutrino (LizardFS.org)

This talk will focus on features of MooseFS which make it very interesting choice for storage alternatives. MooseFS is used all over the world to store hundreds of petabytes of production data. Starting with installation and configuration the talk will move on to management of MooseFS. Then the reasons for creating the LizardFS fork of MooseFS will be presented. Finally the challenges to be solved to make the LizardFS an enterprise ready storage solution will be discussed.

Peter aNeutrino started working in Poland 20 years ago writing assembler for Demoscene. He sharpened his Linux skills working for Siemens, Google and Gemius in Poland. He has spent his last 3 years working on MooseFS. He now is building a team of developers to improve MooseFS using modern development methods. This new Open Source release is LizardFS that he hopes will change everything in today's storage market.

slides (PDF, 1.1MB)

July

Cloud storage options and DFS
Jeff Darcy (Red Hat)

This talk will be compare some of the cloud-storage options that are out there, with a particular focus on distributed filesystems. GlusterFS and Ceph will be compared in detail. Other options including HDFS, object stores, and NoSQL document stores will also be discussed.

Jeff Darcy has been working on distributed storage since DECnet and NFS version 2 in the early 1990s. Later he was one of the original developers for MPFS while at EMC, and is currently an architect for GlusterFS at Red Hat.

slides (PDF, 417KB)

June

Continuous Integration of Infrastructure

Nick Cammorato

Stability is the name of the game for systems and networks operators. It's what we expect and what our end-users expect, but it can be incredibly difficult to achieve - a constant stream of security patches, dead-end releases, broken software, broken hardware, and demands from other internal stakeholders force change. Constant, never ending change.

Complicating this is the fact that these changes are rarely isolated. A change on one system (particularly a lower-layer system like a router) can ripple through entire services. We have, in effect, an integration problem with every software update or configuration change we apply. So to solve this, we look to the software development world to see how they deal with it, and the answer is continuous testing and continuous integration.

At TERC, we're currently combining configuration management (puppet), hierarchical configs (hiera), monitoring (nagios), test software (rspec/cucumber), and a software development CI stack (jenkins/rake/vagrant) in order to address this. This talk will focus on my experiences in rolling all of this out, what the limitations of current software are, and touch on what my plans are to improve it.

slides (PDF, 2MB)