Looong January 2026

Silverfort

Been a mega busy week – deployed an on-prem instance of Silverfort (obviously on Nutanix) and got through all the initial configurations and setup – now its over to our SecOps teams to commence defining all the rules and policies.

Deployment onto the Nutanix platform was straight forward - all the components are VM appliances, deployed the VM’s, powered them up and go through the initial configurations – VM name, IP address info etc etc and you have the management server up in about 15mins.

Obviously, I cannot go into too much details into the setup – it’s a security tool 😉

But I’ve been very impressed with its capabilities to secure identity and resources and with such ease… both on-prem (Active Directory) and in the cloud, for us EntraID.

The product has ‘read-only‘ access to the identity platforms but the information it’s able to gather and show you is scary – gives you great insight into the identity landscape for your environment – the SecOps teams have a lot of work for the next several months.

Here is the home page of the product – very fancy!

Nutanix

This week I also joined a webinar ‘Taming Cloud Chaos: The Nutanix Champions Perspective’ – this webinar brought together folk from the NTC community from across the globe to speak about Nutanix NKP and how the product handles real world workloads, developer and how it simplify day-to-day Kubernetes operations.

I strongly encourage you all to go have a listen of the recording and understand how to Transform Kubernetes from Your Biggest Bottleneck into Your Competitive Edge

https://event.nutanix.com/championstechtalknkpemea?utm_medium=organic-social&utm_campaign=701vo00000qh6w6yak&utm_source=nutanixcommunity

 

 

 

Nutanix NDB - Game Changer!

Last year I started looking into Nutanix NDB platform and I was very impressed at what it offered but my DBA's saw it as a threat - they took it as a platform that would make them redundant.  That was not how I viewed it - I saw opportunity to make our DBA's operational life a lot easier..... help automate their daily tasks, a platform to help them reduce all the operational firefighting, shifting from being operational focused to strategically focused.

After a few months I soon won the battle and had the business onside and budgets approved to proceed with introducing a dedicate Nutanix NDB cluster for one of our most business-critical database which was over 5TB in size.  When this database regularly went offline it cost the business millions as it meant hundreds of specialised technical engineers were unable to work and make strategic decisions.  Therefore, the business was keen to get this database onto a more stable and reliable platform where some of these disruptions could be prevented.

I engaged with Nutanix PS – as I wanted to get the install of NDB right from the get go, my reputation was at stake and I needed NDB impress.  After a week on engagement and building out the platform to my specified design, OS templates created, DB templates created and all IT security auditing complete the environment was ready to spin up the first SQL DB server…..

26 minutes is what it took to created a new Windows 2019 server, joined to the domain, in the correct OU, to corporate standards with all the management tool and IT security agents installed and SQL server 2019 installed ready for creating the first DB AND this was all by one DBA.  Speed, efficiency all come to mind!

We’ve had NDB in for nearly a year and I was asked by my IT manager how has our investment into NDB helped.

They say ‘a picture paints a thousand word’ so put it into a diagram…………

What a typical application upgrade looked like.

 

Now with NDB

How we upgrade SQL platforms…..

Busy Start To Year

Been a manic week – considering we’re only just into the second week of the new year.

This week I attended the Nutanix NTC intro call for all those who have been selected to be on the NTC program for 2026.  The NTC program is Nutanix ‘Premier’ community program to bring all the evangelist together to build and foster a great community of likeminded people – this community is lead by a great leader; Angelo Luciani. 

This year’s NTC announcement can be found at the following link: https://next.nutanix.com/community-blog-154/introducing-the-nutanix-technology-champions-for-2026-45110

Angelo – the leader of the community comes with a lot of energy and goes above and beyond to helps promote the community through regular cadence calls and ‘meet-up’ at events.  He gets us all involved at all levels at Nutanix, from building relationship with the c-suite, with the developers and getting us insights into all the cool tech that’s coming from Nutanix – its all under NDA so cannot always shout about it too early 😉

Any ways, looks like its going to be another great year being part of the NTC community – great things planned and looking forward to meeting my great friends at the annual Nutanix. Next 2026 conference; being held in Chicago April this year. 

This week I’ve also been deploying a new identity security platform from Silverfort – obviously on a Nutanix platform 😉.  So far its all been pretty straight forward – deployed a management appliance and x2 node appliance, took a few hours to get the OVA copied in the environment and new VM’s spun up and initial appliance configurations complete; host names, IP addressed and getting all the applicable upgrades complete.  Next week I’ll look to continue to deploy all the necessary agents and get some identity information flowing into the product-this will of course be scary because as I have no idea what’s going on and of course this will create months’ worth of work to remediate all the finding! Wish Me Luck

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Welcome To My Blog!

I’ve been working in IT for over 25 years since I graduated from university with degree in Computer Science in 2001.  I started work initially in the travel industry for a MSP based at London Heathrow, looking after some of the UK’s flagship airlines, working in a paced environment working to 30min ‘fix’ SLA’s for some customer – this was a fantastic experience as it introduced me to dealing with high pressure, intense scenarios and being able to resolve incidents under pressure.

A few years later, I took a BIG leap into London’s finance industry as a contractor.  Working 6-12 month gig’s over a few years. I worked on a few deployments of Citrix Metaframe farms across some the worlds biggest banking institutes, worked on some merger and divesture activities involving work related to Microsoft Active Directory and also got my first taste of virtualisation – VMware GSX server.

Due to my experience working on M&A activities I was approached to work on a recent acquisition for a major energy company, which involved AD integration, new virtualisation environment and Exchange messaging system integrations.  Whilst working on this contract I was offered a permanent job – which I accepted.

I’ve since then worked in the global energy industry across the UK and North America – working for and with some of the major operators.

Over the years I’ve had the privilege of working with many technologies but my ‘core’ areas of expertise have fallen into the infrastructure and security domains – below is a list of a few technologies where I consider myself an SME with certifications to support.

·        Microsoft Active Directory

o   DNS, DHCP, GPO, DFS-r, ADFS & PKI.

o   Quest Active Role Server & Recovery Manager for AD.

·        Microsoft EntraID

o   M365 Administration – SSO & Inc Teams

·        Microsoft Exchange On-Prem and Exchange Online

o   Quest Recovery Manager for Exchange

o   ProofPoint

·        VMware vSphere

·        IT Forensic - eDiscovery

·        Nutanix HCI Technologies, HPC & NDB.

·        Cohesity & Veritas Backup

·        SentinelOne EDR and Identity Protection

·        Datacenter Design and Management

·        SOX Compliance

·        SilverFort

·        CheckPoint Harmony SASE

·        Vendor Management

I’ve built relationship and networks with vendors and peers over the years who I collaborate with regularly and have had the opportunity to speak publicly at events to share my learns.

I’ve obtained many technical certifications over the years from many vendors and specialist IT bodies, some listed below.

·        Microsoft

·        VMware

·        Citrix

·        NetApp

·        ISC2 - CISSP

·        SANS – GIAC

·        Nutanix

·        ITIL

·        TOGAF

I’ve also had the opportunity to attend many conferences over the year, some major conferences listed below.

·        Microsoft MMS & Ignite

·        VMWorld

·        Nutanix .Next

·        Gartner Infrastructure and Operations Conference

Over the past few years, I’ve obtained an accolade from Nutanix to be a part of their Nutanix Technology Champion (NTC) program – this program has provided me the opportunity to speak at several Nutanix .Next conferences across the world - sharing my learnings with fellow Nutanix users from across the global.  I shall cover more of what I do as an NTC in future blogs.

Of recent, I’ve shifted my focus to transition into a more architectural role specialising in Infrastructure and IT Security – bringing together my vast knowledge and experience from over the years to help design, govern and provide technical strategic direction aligned to business goals to drive positive business outcome.