Reintroduction: Wait, you have what!?!

While I’m reintroducing myself to a digital home, allow myself to introduce… myself.

I can trace the tech in me back to my childhood – I now understand why my parents gave me Legos, Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Shape-O Toy, and Rubik’s Cube (I guess it could have been worse, and I’m thankful, at least my parents loved me enough to let me pick out my own Pet Rock, instead of surprising me with one). While none of them are truly tech toys, they fostered my creativity, cognitive functions and problem solving skills.

So, what does any good father that owns a computer store do with their child that has mastered fort-building-out-of-Legos? That’s right, he takes advantage of the lack of child labor laws during that time and develops a (very young) custom PC builder that requires little, to no, supervision and maybe a Capri Sun. Looking back, I realize I was being exploited, but I got to spend some quality time with my dad learning something fascinating to me, and in the end, I was helping my family – Priceless.

You’re probably asking yourself, “Why the #*@& am I still reading this!?” Since you are now dumber for having read this far, I’ll fast forward to the present.

I’m a Virtualization & Storage Engineer; I throw a ten course meal and the kitchen sink at hardware and then I try a number of different ways to fit a square peg through a round hole by storing more data than I have available storage (maybe the Shape-O Toy didn’t really help me as much as I thought).

Speaking of meals, here’s what I serve up at home:

Server

• Antec P180
• Seasonic 400W PSU
• Super Micro X9SAE
• Intel Xeon E3-1245
• Thermalright Macho HSF
• 32GB RAM
• Crucial m4 256GB SSD (CT256M4SSD2)
• Intel Dual Port GB NIC (x2)
• OS: VMware ESXi
• Installed on: SanDisk Cruzer Fit 32GB USB Flash Drive (SDCZ33-032G-B35)

NAS

• Synology Diskstation DS1812+
• 8 x 3TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 (ST3000DM001)

Desktop – Windows 8 Media Center

I’ll be upgrading my desktop within the next month and swapping everything out, with the exception of:

• Case (custom Voodoo PC case)
• Video Card (ASUS GeForce GT 440)
• Drives (OCZ Vertex 4 128GB SSD + 3TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.14)

Devices/Clients

• Xbox 360
• PS3
• Apple TV
• + Work devices that I use at home every now and then (iPad, Surface RT, Thin Clients)

I can’t remember what else I might have in storage, but I look forward to drudging through all of it over the next few weeks and getting things set up in my new place.

“Wait, you have what!?!”

Like most career techies, I’ve taken my work home with me. While I mainly use my set up for entertainment, I apply a lot of what I learn professionally to my personal practices at home – I currently host seven virtual machines, including a backup server, Windows Storage Server, lab servers, remote workstation, and a Windows 7 Media Center VM for Xbox’s Media Center Extender capabilities, all in a Windows domain. I know it’s overkill for most, but it provides me a lot of agility for growth in my home an environment to develop new and/or different practices that apply to my career. And contrary to what Allen Iverson might think, practice does help – in every aspect of life.

Now that I’ve established where I’ve been and where I’m at, I’ll lay out where I want to be (very soon) in my new (digital) home.