Co-founder and CEO of ActualTech Media and Independent Consultant
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Articles by Scott D. Lowe
Community living rooms: High-ROI strategy
As the hospitality industry evolves, hoteliers and developers increasingly recognize the financial and operational benefits of adopting a “Community Living Room” approach. This trend is not only reshaping guest experiences but also driving substantial return on investment (ROI) for properties that embrace it.
Community living rooms: High-ROI strategy
GLOBAL REPORT – As the hospitality industry evolves, hoteliers and developers increasingly recognize the financial and operational benefits of adopting a “Community Living Room” approach. This trend is not only reshaping guest experiences but also driving substantial return on investment (ROI) for properties that embrace it.
Meet the Robot
Most of us in Southwest Florida have discovered that a popular old adage is quite true: with age comes wisdom. This ongoing search for knowledge is the main reason I have kept his column going for so many years—you information seekers can't get enough. I applaud you all. Naturally, as we age and our healthcare becomes more complicated, we must rely on our proven ability to ask questions and get the answers we need to make the best possible decisions—for our care and the care of our loved ones.
Physicians Regional Collier Boulevard is Ready for More
I recently spoke with a friend who moved out of Southwest Florida a year ago to be closer to his aging parents. He recently returned for a visit and shared with me how stunned he was by the growth up and down Collier Boulevard in just 12 months. Physicians Regional has been preparing for this growth for many years. It's not like the Naples area had an option to expand to the west. We all knew this was coming.
Let's Hear It for the Heart
Though I am a fan of Valentine's Day, because of this annual holiday, the "heart" has essentially taken ownership over the month of February. We've only recently passed February 14 - a big day for "heart" enthusiasts - but there's another reason the heart requires our respect, if not our attention, 365/24/7. As a healthcare professional, I believe the heart beating in your chest is still more important than a carefully illustrated "heart" on a greeting card.
Cooper Goes to Work
I have often wondered how the popular expression, "It's gone to the dogs," came to be. It doesn't reflect well on the canine population, and from my point of view, dogs provide a lot of value to our world. There's little doubt that Southwest Florida is a haven for those who love sunshine and outdoor activities. But all you have to do is take an evening walk through any of our neighborhoods, and our furry friends are likely out in full force.
The right hyper-converged system yields software-defined gains
Source: Getty Visual Editor: Sarah Evans The market for hyper-converged infrastructure products continues to evolve as vendors offer a wide range of integrated appliances to help organizations reduce costs and simplify management.
Cancer-survivor declares God “had us exactly where we needed to be with CHM”
By Scott Lowe, Soddy Daisy, Tenn. Editor’s note: This information was published in the July 2020 issue of Heartfelt Magazine, CHM’s monthly magazine that provides CHM membership-related tips and tricks, medical advice from doctors, testimonies from CHM members, and more. Please refer to the CHM Guidelines and applicable web pages for the most up-to-date information regarding CHM membership, sharing eligibility, and ministry news.
Service Mesh 101: The Role of Envoy
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Join For Free If you’ve done any reading about service meshes, you’ve probably come across mentions of an open-source project named Envoy. And if you’ve done any reading about Envoy, you’ve probably seen references to service meshes. How are these two technologies related? How are they different? Do they work together? I’ll attempt to answer all those questions in this blog post’s first and second parts, plus possibly a few more.
Service mesh 102: Envoy configuration
Guest post originally published on Kong’s blog by Scott Lowe In my Service Mesh 101 article, I talked about some of the basics behind a service mesh: what it is, what it does and where Envoy fits into a service mesh. Having now covered those basics, I’d like to dig into some more in-depth content focused on the basics of Envoy configuration in a service mesh. Recall from the previous article that several different service meshes use Envoy.
Service mesh 101: the role of Envoy
Guest post originally published on Kong’s blog by Scott Lowe If you’ve done any reading about service meshes, you’ve probably come across mentions of an open source project named Envoy. And if you’ve done any reading about Envoy, you’ve probably seen references to service meshes. How are these two technologies related? How are they different? Do they work together? I’ll attempt to answer all those questions in this blog post’s first and second parts, plus possibly a few more. What Is a Service Mesh?
NAS ou objet : quelle solution choisir pour stocker vos données ?
Il y a des avantages et des inconvénients à utiliser le NAS ou le stockage objet pour les données non structurées. Ils dépendent de l’élasticité, des performances et du type d’applications souhaités. par Scott D. Lowe, ActualTech Media Publié le: 05 oct. 2021 Les données non structurées croissent plus vite que les autres en entreprise. Il est de fait particulièrement légitime de se demander quel type de baies de disques est le plus adapté à leur stockage : NAS ou stockage objet ?
Microsoft announces four Windows Server 2012 editions: What you need to know
Scott Lowe explains Microsoft's new licensing for the four editions of Windows Server 2012. Here is what you need to know about upgrading and choosing the right edition. For years, as Microsoft has released new versions of Windows Server, the world has waited with anticipation while Redmond attempted to figure out the exact mix of editions that it would sell to various customer segments.
HCI vs. traditional IT vs. dHCI vs. composable infrastructure
Evaluate Weigh the pros and cons of technologies, products and projects you are considering. Compare outcomes of hyper-converged, traditional/converged, disaggregated HCI and composable infrastructures, plus hybrid cloud, to decide which approach best fits your IT needs. By Scott D. Lowe, ActualTech Media Published: 16 Jun 2020 For over a decade, we've seen the meaning of hyper-converged infrastructure evolve.
How Impactful Is VMware’s New Core-Limited Licensing?
Scott D. Lowe Partner & vExpert, ActualTech Media Follow Scott D. Lowe on Twitter Follow Scott D. Lowe on Linkedin See Scott D. Lowe's latest video on YouTube This week, VMware announced new licensing restrictions for vSphere, which I wrote about here. I wanted to get more understanding for how impactful this change would be for existing customers. On today’s ActualTech Media EcoCast, I asked our audience for two pieces of information.
VMware’s Licensing Change Redux: Better the Second Time Around
CIO, Cloud, Data Center, News, Opinion VMware’s Licensing Change Redux: Better the Second Time Around Posted on February 4, 2020 Scott D. Lowe Partner & vExpert, ActualTech Media Follow Scott D. Lowe on Twitter Follow Scott D. Lowe on Linkedin See Scott D. Lowe's latest video on YouTube The year was 2011. I was comfortably ensconced in my office at Westminster College watching as VMware brought out a marketing executive to discuss the company’s revolutionary new licensing program.
IT consumerization mythbusters: The BYOD policy edition
Manage Learn to apply best practices and optimize your operations. IT consumerization carries with it ample myths and logical fallacies. Scott Lowe busts bring-your-own-device myths in this expert tip. By Scott D. Lowe, ActualTech Media Published: 16 Aug 2012 The IT consumerization revolution is upon us. It takes many forms, from users wanting to use their own laptops and tablet devices to employees getting tired of carrying two smartphones -- one for work and one for personal use.
An introduction to VMware vRealize Operations Cloud
Get started Bring yourself up to speed with our introductory content. VMware is set to release a cloud-based management software as a service in 2020, which uses predictive analytics and AI features to optimize, plan and scale VMware-based hybrid clouds. With the release of vRealize Operations 8.0, VMware announced vRealize Operations Cloud, a unified management offering that offers all the features of vRealize Operations 8.0 but delivered as a SaaS.
3 steps to prepare IT operations for multi-cloud
Manage Learn to apply best practices and optimize your operations. Organizations must ready their IT operations for multi-cloud and the unique security challenges ahead. Equip your IT ops team with the right people and processes to adapt smoothly. By John Burke, Nemertes Research Published: 02 Jan 2020 There are many challenges to successful IT operations.
Hyperconverged Infrastructure in 2020: Continuing to Revolutionize IT
Featured, Hyperconverged Infrastructure, Hyperconvergence Explained Hyperconverged Infrastructure in 2020: Continuing to Revolutionize IT Posted on December 17, 2019 Scott D. Lowe vExpert, MVP Hyper-V, MCSE Way back near the end of the first decade of the current millennium, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) burst into the market; it spent the second decade of the millennium transforming organizations and IT.
What is the role of HCI in a disaster recovery architecture?
Q Evaluate Weigh the pros and cons of technologies, products and projects you are considering. Is hyper-convergence a good fit for disaster recovery? More organizations appear to believe so and are increasingly using hyper-converged infrastructure in backup and DR. Backup and disaster recovery are two areas where hyper-convergence is playing a bigger role, and disaster recovery is a particularly interesting area of use.
Explore compelling benefits of hyper-converged infrastructure
Hyper-converged infrastructure was one of the breakout technologies in what can sometimes be an unforgiving market. At its inception, HCI was little more than a server with some software running atop a hypervisor. But over the years, hyper-converged infrastructure has become increasingly powerful as the technology has matured. Today's hyper-converged offerings are powerful components of enterprise IT architecture, and it can handily solve myriad business and technology challenges.
What works best for IoT storage?
Q Get started Bring yourself up to speed with our introductory content. Storage for IoT devices and applications requires new strategies and approaches. Find out how three approaches are being used to facilitate storage for consumers and enterprises. By Scott D. Lowe, ActualTech Media Published: 29 Oct 2019 In the world of IT, the one constant is rapid change. As new technologies evolve, the services that underpin them must change as well.
What serverless storage options are available?
Q Cloud database services, object storage services and application memory cache are among the options available for storage in serverless environments. By Scott D. Lowe, ActualTech Media Published: 24 Oct 2019 Contrary to the name, serverless doesn't mean there's no traditional infrastructure behind a service. Rather, it means enterprises can call up well-orchestrated functions that don't appear to consume such resources.
How VCF on VxRail helps achieve hybrid cloud victory
With Dell's release of VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail, also known as VCF on VxRail, the company is aiming to make a splash in its efforts to transform the Dell EMC hyper-converged platform into a cloud hub. But what exactly is this shiny new offering, and how can it help your organization address its ongoing business needs? What is VxRail?
How can predictive analytics for unstructured data improve storage?
Q News Stay informed about the latest enterprise technology news and product updates. AI-based analytics capabilities are becoming pervasive in storage arrays. Find out how they're helping get the unstructured data deluge under control. By Scott D. Lowe, ActualTech Media Published: 17 Oct 2019 What happens when you meld traditional analytics with storage infrastructure? You get the AI-driven analytics for data storage that's now built into most storage arrays.
Composable infrastructure techniques for the real world
The data center architectural environment has morphed from a single stack to one that exists on a wide spectrum. The traditional three-tier data center is at one end, while the other is redefined on a continual basis as enterprise IT architecture vendors bring new capabilities to all aspects of the stack.
Bootstrapping an AWS-Integrated Kubernetes 1.15 Cluster with Kubeadm
A lot of effort has been put into kubeadm, an open source project focused on providing best-practice fast paths for creating Kubernetes clusters. While the upstream documentation for bootstrapping clusters with kubeadm is very good, it doesn’t cover use cases involving a cloud provider—there are a lot of different variables that would need to be discussed, and with the changes around the way cloud provider integration is implemented, bootstrapping with kubeadm can be complex.
A close look at different types of hyper-converged architectures
What started as a basic conglomeration of servers and storage has fractured into a variety of options. I'm talking about hyper-converged infrastructure, which first came on the scene in relatively simple packaging but, with the passage of time, has transformed what used to be a one-size-fits-all offering into a series of options for enterprises to consider. This article presents an overview of this evolution of hyper-converged architectures.
What's the role of metadata in unstructured data management?
Q Evaluate Weigh the pros and cons of technologies, products and projects you are considering. Discover how to expand your organization's use of metadata to improve the management and storage of unstructured data to make it more organized and accessible. By Scott D. Lowe, ActualTech Media Published: 04 Sep 2019 To some extent, most storage systems use metadata -- all that data about data.
VMware vRealize Automation 8.0 Gets a Modern Makeover
Scott D. Lowe Partner & vExpert, ActualTech Media Follow Scott D. Lowe on Twitter Follow Scott D. Lowe on Linkedin See Scott D. Lowe's latest video on YouTube SAN FRANCISCO, AUG 26 – At VMworld 2019, VMware announced that vRealize Automation has been redesigned from the ground up, and VMware believes the new version will greatly enhance the ability for its customers to deploy and manage multi-cloud environments.
What hyper-converged network details should I consider?
Q Get started Bring yourself up to speed with our introductory content. No longer a second-class citizen to compute and storage, networking is now integral to most HCIs. Keep in mind certain networking facts when adopting hyper-convergence, however. ActualTech Media Published: 27 Aug 2019 Early iterations of hyper-converged infrastructure were simple beasts. They combined storage, compute and a hypervisor to provide to a simple method by which to deploy enterprise virtual machines.
3 key unstructured data storage challenges and how to resolve them
Unstructured data is everything that doesn't fit into the neatly arranged rows and columns of a database. It can be a file server that has become a dumping ground for all of the Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations your organization uses. It can also include photos, videos, email messages and a whole lot more. For years, IT pros have struggled to find ways to deal with unstructured data.
How to choose hyper-converged backup for data protection
Evaluate Weigh the pros and cons of technologies, products and projects you are considering. Data protection is essential for any hyper-converged infrastructure. How you back up data -- natively, agentless or using agents -- depends on your environment and other factors.
The Great Slack to Teams Migration: 1 Year Later
Scott D. Lowe Partner & vExpert, ActualTech Media Follow Scott D. Lowe on Twitter Follow Scott D. Lowe on Linkedin See Scott D. Lowe's latest video on YouTube On a fateful day in August 2018, we made the decision to extricate ourselves from Slack and jump headfirst into Microsoft Teams. I’ve previously written about our early experiences here and here. It was September of 2018 when we officially cut over from Slack to Teams, but we’d been doing a lot of configuration and testing up to that point.
How do I measure overall TCO when comparing HCI vendors?
Q Get started Bring yourself up to speed with our introductory content. Comparing the TCO of deploying different HCI vendors' platforms makes it likelier you'll pick the right one for your organization. Start the process with our checklist. ActualTech Media Published: 31 Jul 2019 Every IT purchase carries with it a requirement for some kind of ROI. There are two components that determine ROI: The first is the revenue the investment enables; the second is the total cost of that investment.
NAS vs. object storage: What's best for unstructured data storage?
Q Evaluate Weigh the pros and cons of technologies, products and projects you are considering. There are advantages and disadvantages to using NAS or object storage for unstructured data. Find out what to consider when it comes to scalability, performance and workload type. ActualTech Media Published: 29 Jul 2019 Unstructured data is among the fastest-growing data types out there.
10 things you shouldn't do when running network cable
Improperly installed cabling can cripple network performance, create maintenance headaches, and lead to hidden costs. Here's where things can go wrong. 5 essential things to remember when running network cable Network cabling mistakes can come back to haunt users and IT teams alike. Here are five ways to avoid creating future network cabling headaches. Network cabling can be a finicky thing.
3 ways to deploy hyper-converged infrastructure
madgooch - stock.adobe.com Get started Bring yourself up to speed with our introductory content. An HCI deployment can be done in one of three ways -- full replacement, side-by-side or per application -- each with pluses and minus, depending on requirements and resources. ActualTech Media Published: 12 Jul 2019 So you're adopting hyper-converged infrastructure.
Know the risk of hyper-converged vendor lock-in, myths and facts
Often, I hear people discuss the concept of vendor lock-in as if it's avoidable. Sure, to some extent, that may be possible, but there comes a point at which you'll need to make a decision and run with it. And, frankly, every decision you make results in lock-in to some degree. It's a myth that lock-in is completely avoidable, including the risk of hyper-converged vendor lock-in.
360in180: Taking Microsegmentation to the Next Level
Scott D. Lowe Partner & vExpert, ActualTech Media Follow Scott D. Lowe on Twitter Follow Scott D. Lowe on Linkedin See Scott D. Lowe's latest video on YouTube Security is top of mind for many an organization today as new attack vectors are devised and executed on every day. Keeping up with the sheer diversity of potential areas of vulnerability is a primary concern as companies seek to stay out of the news and in business.
HPE Wants to SaaSify All the Clouds
Scott D. Lowe Partner & vExpert, ActualTech Media Follow Scott D. Lowe on Twitter Follow Scott D. Lowe on Linkedin See Scott D. Lowe's latest video on YouTube Will you be satisfied is everything is SaaSified? You’ll eventually be able to find out thanks to HPE’s GreenLake. HPE GreenLake is a service from HPE that enables a consumption-based model for the services offered under the program.
Essential hyper-converged backup, data protection questions to ask
Q Get started Bring yourself up to speed with our introductory content. Procure a hyper-converged infrastructure, and you'll need to protect the data residing in that environment. Ask and answer these questions to determine the best HCI backup approach for your organization. ActualTech Media Once you procure a hyper-converged infrastructure, you must protect the data that resides in that environment.
Why is composable infrastructure important and what are its uses?
Q Evaluate Weigh the pros and cons of technologies, products and projects you are considering. The ideal function of composability is to make IT infrastructure more flexible, manageable and scalable than ever. It isn't for everyone, however; at least, not yet. ActualTech Media A couple of years ago, HPE jumped into the market and attempted to define a new term -- composable infrastructure.
Yes, pertinent, cost-effective hyper-converged platforms for SMBs exist
Some organizations may not seem like a good fit for anything other than what would be considered the norm for data center architecture options. SMBs, for example, often take little IT risk because so little budget goes toward those needs. Getting infrastructure wrong at a smaller organization can have a far greater effect than a mistake at a larger business, where there are likely additional dollars to fix errors.
Robin.io Inks Partnership with Google Cloud to Transform Kubernetes Storage
Scott D. Lowe Partner & vExpert, ActualTech Media Follow Scott D. Lowe on Twitter Follow Scott D. Lowe on Linkedin See Scott D. Lowe's latest video on YouTube If you’re a developer in 2019, you’re aware of containers and if you’re aware of containers, you’re likely either using or considering using Kubernetes, the container orchestration platform that has quickly and handily won the container orchestration wars.
A guide to hyper-converged data resiliency options and requirements
Sergej Khackimullin - Fotolia Evaluate Weigh the pros and cons of technologies, products and projects you are considering. What you need to find out from HCI vendors to architect a resilient hyper-converged environment that will protect data against failure, error and attack. ActualTech Media One benefit hyper-converged infrastructure offers to IT environments is simplicity. Suddenly, there's no more separate storage tier to manage and scaling becomes a breeze.
Intel Data-Centric Innovation Day: A Live View
Scott D. Lowe Partner & vExpert, ActualTech Media Follow Scott D. Lowe on Twitter Follow Scott D. Lowe on Linkedin See Scott D. Lowe's latest video on YouTube 9:35 AM: We’re getting a bit of a late start. Bob Swan, Intel CEO, is giving us an introduction before the main event starts. He’s discussing the transformation of Intel from a PC-centric company to a Data-centric one, which explains the name of today’s event. Data-centric computing represents a $1.25T opportunity this year alone.
Is HCI but a stop on the road to composable architecture?
Q Get started Bring yourself up to speed with our introductory content. Find out if composable infrastructure is the next step in the evolution of HCI, if it is a completely different type of IT infrastructure or if the truth is somewhere in between. ActualTech Media There is an entire spectrum of computing options -- traditional, converged and hyper-converged -- available for the on-premises, private cloud, public cloud and multi-cloud worlds.
Why might you choose to forgo flash in hyper-converged storage?
Q Problem solve Get help with specific problems with your technologies, process and projects. Find out why and for what use cases and application workloads 100% solid-state flash may not be the best storage choice for hyper-converged infrastructure. ActualTech Media Spinning disk is dead! Long live spinning disk! It isn't unusual to read both of these headlines in the news nowadays.
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