Meet NPX 015 – Bruno Sousa
- Name: Bruno Sousa
- NPX Number:015
- Employer: Nutanix
- Blog URL: N/A
- Twitter: @bsousapt
- Virtualisation background: My very first exposure to an “enterprise ready” virtualization was with ESX 3.5 on HP servers to virtualize nothing else then…Oracle 8 and Oracle 9 workloads for a medical research center in Porto (my hometown) , Portugal.
After this experience I had the opportunity to work/manage/architect KVM, Citrix Xen, Oracle VM, VMware and Solaris LDOMS, IBM LPAR based solutions, mainly for HealthCare and manufacturing environments.
- Storage Background:My storage experience has been primarily around solutions like Equallogic, Hitachi , Solaris (StorageTek and ZFS based ) and BlueArc NAS.
Have been managing Fiber Channel and Ethernet based storage solutions, and I don’t miss for one moment the complexity of LUNs/zoning !:)
- Hyper Converged Infrastructure background: Started working with Nutanix August 2014 within the Support organization where I quickly moved to a senior role where I mainly handled performance related cases, regarding fileservers, MS-SQL , Oracle, backups, application servers.
Before joining Nutanix I spent around 10 months on a project to move facilities within my former employer where we took the opportunity to redesign our IT environment, and by doing this I realized how hard it was to deal with traditional IT solutions and I set myself into a mission to find a better solution…and Nutanix came along and I didn’t think twice when I got the job offer to join Nutanix.
- Future of HCI and other emerging technologies:HCI as a technology is here to stay , and perhaps the current model will change but the theory where data needs to be close to the application, pay as you grow, design a system to survive failures with minimal impact to apps/users is here to stay. HCI as a concept will still need to prove itself in the market in terms of “perception” aKa FUD, but there’s no doubt that HCI is the future, and this shows by several studies showing that every IT vendor has some sort of HCI solution.
The philosophy of having the same IT architecture design as Internet Giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook within the reach of any datacenter is a very powerful message, and the flexibility and reliability of such solution is something that any customer, vendor, partner is actively considering and / or implementing.
- Value of NPX: NPX as a program provides a way to validate the knowledge that someone has , and to understand the areas that one has to improve. It also provides a structured approach to tackle an IT project, where you start by gathering requirements (technical and non-technical) , document risks, constraints and have an iterative process of conceptual à logical à physical design .
For anyone that has a strong technical background it’s extremely easy to skip the business requirements and deal directly with the technical components, however knowing the technical part is only ½ way done…one needs to be think as a Project Manager, IT Architect and IT Engineer to deliver a solution , to provide a solution that meets business needs.
- What made you go for NPX:I saw NPX as one of my largest professional challenges since I had been exposed “only” to the technical part (hands-on job) and never had the time/opportunity to have a holistic view on the end solution. Together with the fact that my peers, whom I have the upmost respect for, challenged me to go for it, I knew I had to make it!
It was a long (over 1 year) period , with several hundred hours invested, but it was worth it since I now know much more from a technical and non-technical point of view and this allows me to provide better solutions for customers.
- Advise to people looking into the NPX track:NPX track is a marathon and not a sprint, so prepare yourself for long periods of work without seeing any “results” (the phase where one investigates, and investigates but nothing is done) . Set small goals, like write one paragraph per day/week/weekend and make sure you stay on track with your *own* goals.
Support from family and friends is key to your success on this process. You won’t be able to focus on the challenge ahead if you don’t have the support from those who surround you.
Make sure you find some way to focus on something else besides the NPX process, to ensure that you keep mentally fit.