Author: Luca Dell'Oca

Luca Dell’Oca, 2011/2012/2013 VMware vExpert,works in IT since 2000. Since 2006, he’s working as a virtualization consultant and architect, specialized in the design and management of VMware infrastructures. He is also a co-founder and board member of the Italian VMware User Group, and author of the blog www.virtualtothecore.com, where he regularly publishes articles on everything related to virtualization.
Analysis

Erasure Coding: the best data protection for scaling-out?

Luca Dell'Oca,

I’ve always been a fan of scale-out storage solutions, and I’ve always preached about them.
As data is skyrocketing, the best viable way to cope with this growth is having a system that can be scaled accordingly without the pain of data migrations involving TBs of data. One of the limits of scale-out systems however has always been the data protection techniques applied to them. RAID is inefficient, replication is too expensive, so what about Erasure Coding? Is it mature enough to become the new data protection technique for storage systems?

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Geek's Life

Social media automation, how to save time with Zapier (and say godbye to IFTTT)

Luca Dell'Oca,

Managing all the social media I’m involved in takes time, that’s for sure.
In the previous months, I started to use IFTTT: it has a nice interface, and it’s super easy to create a new “recipe”, that is the name used to describe a new automation task. IFTTT has another great advantage in being completely free, but for my use it quickly showed its limits. Two of the biggest ones are the limit to one account per supported service and the lack of support for common services like the ability to post to Linkedin groups. Meanwhile, IFTTT is adding support for tons of “weird” and niche services while the lack of complete support for the common services like those I described before goes on…
I decided to give a try to Zapier, and I quickly realized it’s a far better tool than IFTTT for my needs!

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Geek's Life

Your design is not carved in stone

Luca Dell'Oca,

No design is carved in stone. Different needs, hardware changes, new business requirements, or as in this case the introduction of a new technology that needs to work together with the existing ones, require the design to be changed and adapted. So, the design is never perfect, rather it’s the best one for that specific situation and time; as the situation changes, so it should also the design.

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Tech

Pre-built Windows virtual machines

Luca Dell'Oca,

Virtual appliances are one of the coolest and most useful little things that you can use in a virtualized environment. Whenever you need to quickly test a new software, a new platform, it’s always nice and welcomed when its creator puts out a pre-configured appliance for it. No time “wasted” to install and configure the underlying operating system and all the needed libraries, the virtual machine is ready to be powered up and used.

This has always been the case for software based on Linux, because its redistribution license has always granted the possibility to easily repackage it and distribute the final appliance. With Microsoft however, this has always been a problem. Software based on Microsoft platform cannot be easily packaged that way.

Lately, however, I found a great solution to have at least the whole operating system up and running in few minutes.

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