Background to me and bladewatch.com

I’m 26, I’ve been working in the finance sector since 2002 in various roles. I’ve worked for IT or the business in ‘projects and support roles; deploying new servers, decommissioning old ones, participating in server and data center migrations, blade deployment VMWare and grid projects.

I started the blog to remove the black art that tends to surround the products/solutions out there. There’s a tendency for the vendors to make some great products, just look at VMWare, Virtual Iron (virtualization) or Platform/DataSynapse and Tangosol (grid/hpc), but what I always tended to find is that the vendor can deploy it technically, that we can get it to work, but its afterwards that we have the issues.

That there wasn’t a place I could go to, to ‘google’ issues deploying blades, to have bullet points, or a post or two saying think about cooling or energy requirements. Or even how we dealt with the whole ownership of a virtual server, or the chargeback, Do I take the cost of the ESX server and charge that cost per virtual machine? Do I charge per virtual cpu?

All the kind of things that if you consider them before, maybe not fix, but have answers, responses, it can make the way you interact with your customers whether its’ Fixed Income Derivatives, or ‘Mike from accounts’ (the small business wanting their Exchange server hosted).

So within the blog I try to include some best practice, some ideas, a few topics of interest in the news and anything else of interest. It’s written by me on my Nokia E61, at home or after work. I do on-call so sometimes the quantity of posts isn’t as high as it could be. But, if you have any questions, or even suggestions on content, email me: martinmacleod@mac.com.

An interview of me by my good friend Chris is posted is below:

So why bladewatch

Originally I started the blog just to highlight items I thought were interesting about blades and vmware to keep me up to date, and if anyone else read it, great! As the blog came along I started to note down things I’d discovered at work or playing at home, whether during the blade deployment process, or things I had noticed with vmware, or found out when speaking with people.

I had a series of challenges with IBM blade deployment because I was used to the HP BL30/35 blades, and one of the things I remember thinking at the time was wouldn’t it be great if you could google a silent install IBM network card driver” and get the command. IBM provide it, but you need to download the documentation, the driver, read the readme file, with that in mind when I came across things like that, I’d note it down and post an entry about it.

How many people work for bladewatch?

At the moment I write the content, there’s also, a PR and business consultant, and one datacenter consultant who’s been CIO at several large multinational organizations who help me out at times.

Cool, but you mention HP a lot, any reason for this?

Well I know a lot about HP servers, and I use them as a benchmark for this reason.

I try not to be too vendor aligned, the ILO content was simply because I got emails asking for ILO, I know it can take a while to go through the manuals, so I thought I’d post a few entries about how to do things quickly.

Who funds Bladewatch and are you sponsored by anyone?

I fund the site myself, all costs are covered by me from my consultancy income, I’m not sponsored by anyone.

Ever thought about advertising? A banner?

Yes I’m happy to discuss advertising, but it would have to be in the right way. I Don’t want to damage my credibility, it means a lot to me.

How many visitors do you get?

I subscribe to a couple of sites that give me rough idea, Technoratti and mybloglog, but the content was recently syndicated, so it’s difficult to tell. Our site monitor tools indicate 170,000 hits a month with a readership of approximately 40,000 but the figures vary.

Do you get paid for any of your content? You a professional writer?

No to both questions, anyone can use my content if they feel it is of value, and the documents I post and link to are also for anyone to use.

I’m not a professional writer, I write the blog when I have time either during the day on my mobile, at home before or after work. Sometimes on-call can disrupt the number of posts I do in a day which I apologize for.

Alright but if you could live on sponsorship from the blog would you?

Good question, I’d have to say no.

To be honest I love my work, I don’t mind the oncall, or working until 3am, I love support, I love the buzz from dealing with an issue, I love playing with the technology, and I don’t think the content would be as effective if I wasn’t actually deploying it or involved with it.