Extremely off-topic: Another recognition of my work

Regular readers of my blog might remember that I’ve hard-earned a prestigious “Certified Religious Bovine Professional” title after getting into the firewall holy cows debate.

This time, my bridging/TRILL-focused posts earned me the distinguished “old-school network guru from an Ivory Tower” designation, together with a bit of a career advice (“Dont be the guy saying 'No' to DC virtualization from your Ivory Tower”)... or it could be that Brad Hedlund had someone else in mind and I’m just a presumptuous GONER; after all, there are hundreds of people writing about DC bridging these days.

Anyhow, on the odd chance that I was included in that honored group, Brad didn’t need to worry about my career:

• We (NIL Data Communications) have been using VMware server virtualization since 2002, when we started using it for non-critical IT services. At the same time, we’ve deployed a SAN network to support VM migration between physical servers.
• Server virtualization is one of the cornerstones of our scalable remote labs implementation; the first remote labs using virtualization were the security labs supporting CCSP curriculum in 2003;
• At the moment, we have only two or three bare-metal servers; every else is virtualized.
• We’re heavy users of VMotion and VMware power optimizations. After all, running 800 physical devices in a remote lab environment consumes a lot of power and we’re turning off everything we can when it’s not used (including physical servers, routers and switches).
• Based on our hands-on experience with server virtualization, we’ve created the NIL Hypercenter architecture, where we try to balance the needs for security, management and business agility.
• Based on our investment in VMware technologies, we’re VMWare Enterprise Partner and VMWare Authorized Consultant Gold Partner. Likewise, we’re Authorized Technology Provider for Data Center Unified Computing (UCS) and a few other bits and pieces.
• Last but not least, we’re offering our own IT-as-an-infrastructure cloud service for over a year. Obviously, everything we do there is virtualized and (just as a side-remark) we’re just now introducing Cisco UCS into that environment.

Yeah, I know all this is blatant self-promotion (and a shouting match ... but then the title warned you it’s all off-topic), but sometimes one has to mention that he has a bit more than an academic background.