Full Training Program

This tutorial is also available for live streaming. 
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Do you find yourself repeating a task often?  Do you have to retrieve information or change settings on a number of servers or users at once or regularly? Do you find clicking repetitively just too slow to keep up?

If you answered any of these questions with a "Yes," don't miss this half-day class. We will cover a number of ways to make you more productive, in less time—and it is far easier than you may think possible.

As a system administrator, you are already a crack technical analyst or engineer, but does your management understand the value and importance of your work? When you ask for staff or funding to support new or existing efforts, does management readily support you? Does management look to you to develop the future of IT services in your organization? Do you feel you have enough time to focus on projects and innovation instead of fire-fighting?

If you answered no to several of the above questions, then this course is for you. The first step toward improving your professional quality of life is to create a positive and collaborative relationship with your management. So why not take responsibility for the relationship? Senior management makes the decisions about budget, staffing, and, often, new services, without understanding the full impact of their decisions. What if you could make yourself part of that process? What if it was easy to ask your management for more resources because they already believed strongly in your positive contribution to the organization?

System administrators often have all the responsibility for IT systems, but none of the control. In this course we bring the two sides together by teaching the system administrator how to communicate effectively so that management will listen and understand. You can use the tactics presented here to increase your value in the organization and improve your marketability.

Make business look good, and you become an important asset to your organization. Your management will appreciate these skills because you will be demonstrating your value in ways they understand and that empower them to make smart IT investment decisions. In turn, your professional credibility increases, putting you in a position to influence decisions impacting your role in the organization.

This tutorial is also available for live streaming. 
Find out more            Purchase this Session

Ganeti is a cluster virtualization system developed mostly at Google but used by many organizations worldwide. Businesses and groups can leverage the power of Ganeti to easily and effectively manage fleets of physical hosts and use them to schedule virtual machine guests.

Reasons for choosing Ganeti include that it is very lightweight, it is simple to install and manage, and it doesn't demand special storage hardware.

Savvy sysadmins know that WordPress is no longer just a blogging engine. In more and more cases it hits a sweet spot for people who need a simple content management system to manage their Web site. It is powerful, relatively easy to use, doesn't require a consultant to set up, ties into a whole bunch of other services, is part of a thriving ecosystem, oh, and is (mostly) free.

If you ever get asked to create a Web site for your company, a non-profit you volunteer for, your religious community, a friend's business, an upcoming conference, or the ilk, you owe it to yourself to add WordPress to your toolbox. This class will teach you, from one sysadmin to another, how to implement WordPress to handle all of these scenarios.

There has been tremendous innovation in the data storage industry over the past few years.  New storage architectures have come to market to challenge traditional SAN and NAS products with nimble new designs that are much better suited to serving the increasingly virtual nature of applications and server infrastructure. Meanwhile, the allure of cloud computing and the emergence of affordable enterprise-class solid state storage devices have inspired ever more innovative approaches to storage caching, tiering, and deduplication. This lecture is a survey of the latest trends and advances in the data storage industry. We trace the I/O path from application to storage media and look at a wide variety of solutions to the ever-changing challenges of data storage.

Attendees must bring a laptop for in-class exercises. Techniques will apply to any wiki or collaborative document system, but the labs and demos will be done using Google Apps.

Most IT organizations report exponential data growth over time, and whether your data doubles every year, every two years, or every five years, the simple fact remains that if your data capacities double, then both the capacity and the performance of your backup system must double. All of this doubling stresses traditional approaches to data management. Thus, it is no surprise that backup/recovery is one of the most costly and unforgiving operations in the data center. Meanwhile, most IT organizations also report that the vast majority of their unstructured data is seldom or never accessed. Files accumulate year after year, choking the backup systems and driving up costs.

This course explores two main ways to manage the data deluge: (1) optimize backup systems by eliminating bottlenecks, streamlining operations, and bulking up backup infrastructure; and (2) manage the life cycles of unstructured data so that files that are not in active use can be managed separately from files that are in active use. We start by offering a simple framework for defining business requirements and comparing solutions at a high level. We then delve into the various mechanisms for lifecycle management and for eliminating backup system bottlenecks. Some time is spent exploring storage systems that have built-in mechanisms for data protection and lifecycle management.

You want to innovate: deploy new technologies such as configuration management (CFEngine, Puppet, Chef), a wiki, or standardized configurations. Your coworkers don't want change. They like it the way things are. Therefore, they consider you evil. However you aren't evil; you just want to make things better.