I'm a server and infrastructure guy with a penchant for the big picture and a lifelong love of technology.

I'm not looking for new opportunities at this time.

Ask me about my homelab, and ignore the huge backlog of projects. I've redone my home networks for the end of my Meraki licenses, then switched back. I've worked in networking and storage although it's been a little while. I have never been a developer. I've never waited tables (even database tables) but respect those who do. I admit what I don't know and learn quickly. 

Today I'm an engineering product manager for UCS networking in the compute business at Cisco. 

From 2022-2023 I was product line manager for software management products at Supermicro. 

From 2018-2020 I focused on channel partner enablement, partner sales engineering, solutions engineering at Cisco. 

From 2014-2018 I played storyteller/matchmaker between big data ISVs, Cisco channel partners and internal sales teams, and occasionally a customer or 100. I've been doing big data since late 2003/early 2004 (really) and Hadoop since probably 2008 (CDH1). I presented at partner events and public conferences including Strata+Hadoop World (2x) and Cisco Live (4x, Distinguished Speaker). 

On the first day at Cisco (right after lunch), I pushed a half million dollar deal over the edge with my personal experience outweighing a competitor's positioning. From then on, I brought context and proportion to challenging situations, helping our customers succeed and our sales teams make money. I believe those two should not be mutually exclusive, and I consider it my mission to bring them together wherever I work. 

Before Cisco, I was a senior level Silicon Valley systems operations professional with nearly 20 years (different years, even) of production UNIX system administration in multiple varieties of UNIX (Solaris, Linux, BSD) as well as experience in other desktop and server platforms. I built a proven history of delivering enterprise class scalable server, network, and DR/BC environments within stringent budget and time restraints.

I blog at rsts11.com and rsts11travel.com. 

Specialties: Big data platforms, hardware, and education; system administration, hardware planning and management (even clouds need hardware), Hadoop, written English (documentation is our friend), UNIX-based email systems, coffee preparation & procurement, operations team building and sustaining. 

I'm not a developer or coder although I can read or tweak some code. I don't have an MBA or a PhD. 

I'm not looking for new opportunities at this time.

Robert Novak

I just posted a cluster deployment walk-through on the Cisco Community site, rolling out Proxmox VE 9.1 from Proxmox Server Solutions on the Cisco UCS X210c M7 modular servers. 

It was a fun and productive effort, having not touched Intersight for the larger part of the last decade. Next up in the time machine recovery, I'll be writing up Ceph deployment on VE 9.1 after about 13 years away from Ceph (I last used it on Cisco UCS C220 M3S at Disney Interactive in 2013 or so, trying to deal with Tanenbaum's Law and a datacenter migration). 

Are you running Proxmox VE on Cisco UCS? Tell me what's going on in the comments.

🚝Robert Novak

Open article: Proxmox Virtual Environment for Cisco UCS Servers by community.cisco.com

Proxmox Virtual Environment for Cisco UCS Servers

So last month I learned that my Lenovo Thinkstation P360 won't drive an eGPU on the TB4 ports. 

Last night I learned that my Intel NUC10i7FNH1 won't drive an eGPU on the TB3 ports, or when it does, it interferes with the NVMe drive (and possibly SATA, although that might have just been an 8 year old 60GB SSD finally dying). 

Apple Silicon Macs don't seem to care for NVIDIA GPUs, from what I read, so I haven't even tried that. 

But my Lenovo Thinkpad P1 Gen 2 (nice little Xeon laptop) seemed okay with the eGPU. 

I'm so tired.

Who wouldn't want to go through a new account process for every application in the same platform, manually entering your resume after uploading it, realizing no human will ever look at more than 5 words of it? 

Been there, done that.

Paddy Jobsman | Helping creators + brands grow with memes & creative content | 1M+ social media followers across two brands

>saw the perfect job to apply for
>workday application

Ultra Ethernet Consortium

The Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) brings together leading companies for industry-wide cooperation to build a complete Ethernet-based communication stack architecture for high-performance networking. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High-Performance Computing (HPC) workloads are rapidly evolving and require best-in-class functionality, performance, interoperability and total cost of ownership, without sacrificing developer and end-user friendliness. The Ultra Ethernet solution stack will capitalize on Ethernet’s ubiquity and flexibility for handling a wide variety of workloads while being scalable and cost-effective.

Chair, Steering Committee

Coordinates strategy across AMD on various industry initiatives related to systems architecture, and determine technical engagements around emerging system technologies and companies.

Technical Director - Systems Design

SNIA

Chair of the Board of Directors for the Storage Networking Industry Association. Responsible for coordinating and facilitating the operation of the largest vendor-neutral storage organization in the world.

Chair Of The Board Of Directors

Member, Board of Directors

Rockport Networks Inc.

Technical field engineer dedicated to promoting new technology for semi-stealth startup.

Field CTO

Cisco

During the tenure so far at Cisco, J has been a Product Manager as well as an R&D Engineer, working primarily in the realm of Data Center Storage. He's been on the Boards of Directors for several industry associations, developed several storage technologies, and is an award-winning speaker and presenter. He is also the author of more than 100 technical blogs and public presentations, and is considered a trusted source for storage technology.

R&D Engineer, Office of the CTO (S3G)

Product Manager & R&D Engineer

I have always been a huge proponent of the next-generation Data Center, of Unified Fabric, and this new role gives me an opportunity to expand upon my small role with Converged Networks and extrapolate up into making Unified Fabric stronger and even more powerful for our customers’ deployments. 

Like most technically-oriented people, I gravitate towards some of the wickedly cool things that get innovated. The work being done right now on Unified Fabric falls squarely in this category, as there are some mind-bogglingly beautiful concepts and ideas in the works. Granted, like everything else it may not be this year or even next year when they see the light of day, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t being worked on.

Strategic Product Manager, Storage and Unified Fabric

NVM Express

Member, Promoter's Board (Board of Directors)

Fibre Channel Industry Association

QLogic

Create product messaging and brand awareness for entire line of 20+ HP products through coordinating marketing campaigns, including trade shows, technical road shows, and video podcasts. Present training sessions to large groups of internal and external clients to ensure understanding of new solutions. Engage with product launch teams to form methods to bring new technologies to market.

Sr. Outbound Technical Marketing Manager

Evangelized and promoted bleeding-edge technology, delivering dozens of presentations to hundreds of people. Liaise between multiple departments, effectively providing support for sales, marketing, and customer support. Orchestrate on-site field tests of new equipment as well as install and configure new equipment.

Solutions Architect for Emerging Technologies

Apple

Interfaced with clients to determine best-fit solutions involving data centers, servers, and SANs. Conducted on-site implementation of solution, offering post-sales customer support. Responded to RFPs and offered pre-sales consulting to prospective clients. Created and delivered customized technical presentations to clients of all levels.

Systems Engineer

Communiweb Communications, Inc.

Directed company operations and day-to-day management of company. Established and maintained business relationships with partners, provided direct consultation to potential clients, presented materials in response to competitive bids, and implemented customer projects.

President

[Note: Please do not be offended if I do not accept your LI request. Too many requests simply wish to look for work (I don't recommend people I don't know) or seek to sell their services (I have no influence on this)]

J is Technical Director for Systems Design for AMD where he works to coordinate and lead strategy on various industry initiatives related to systems architecture. Recognized as a leading storage networking expert, J is an evangelist for all storage-related technology and has a unique ability to dissect and explain complex concepts and strategies. He is passionate about the innerworkings and application of emerging technologies.

J has previously held roles in both startup and Fortune 100 companies as a Field CTO,  R&D Engineer, Solutions Architect, and Systems Engineer. He has been a leader in several key industry standards groups, sitting on the Board of Directors for the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), and Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe). A popular blogger and active on Twitter, his areas of expertise include NVMe, SANs, Fibre Channel, and computational storage.

J is an entertaining presenter and prolific writer. He has won multiple awards as a speaker and author, writing over 300 articles and giving presentations and webinars attended by over 10,000 people. He earned his PhD from the University of Georgia.


J Metz

I'm hiring. If someone you know may be interested, please feel free to share this link. :)

https://lnkd.in/g5nE4waa

Technical Director - Systems Design at AMD

Storage & Networking Architect - DC Systems Group  

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Robert Novak

J Metz

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The Battle

Robert Novak

J Metz

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Robert Novak's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreRobert Novak's LinkedIn Performance