In our ongoing series of interviews with the Dell TechCenter Rockstars, we aim to contribute to the Enterprise IT community by shining a light on the IT pros that participate in online conversations.
Recently, we interviewed Pete Koehler, who was inducted into both the Dell TechCenter Rockstars program and the VMware vExpert program in 2013.
Pete has almost 2 decades of experience in the IT industry and he currently lives in Bellevue, Washington where he works as an IT manager and blogs regularly on vmpete.com.
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Please tell us about yourself. What is your current role and where do you work?
I'm currently the IT Manager at Tecplot, Inc. Based in Bellevue, Washington, Tecplot is a software company that provides data visualization solutions for engineers and scientists. My responsibilities cover a broad spectrum, but I try to stay focused on big picture architectural matters with regards to virtualization, networking, and shared storage. I also am involved in helping teams have better solutions to improve their workflows, as well as helping our senior management team understand trends in technology that they should know about.
What is your IT blog about, and how did you get started?
I like to focus on posts that help others put the technical pieces of the puzzle together. I enjoy providing information as seen from the trenches. I am totally incapable of writing a short blog post, since I try to fill in the gaps that deployment guides or other articles may not address. The blog started on a whim back in 2008 when we began virtualizing our infrastructure. I thought I might run out of things to write about. I don't worry about that anymore.
How did you get involved in the IT industry? Do you specialize in any particular IT technology?
I started out my career as a Drafter for an engineering firm in the early 90's. The IT Administrator noticed right away that I was automating CAD systems, and fixing everything plugged in. It was a great way to get my feet wet. While I'm passionate about Virtualization, storage, and networking that serve up modern data center architectures, I'm also proud to call myself a generalist. It allows for a great blend of strategic versus tactical thinking. Businesses don't care about packets and protocols. They want solutions that serve their needs. It's easy to get lost in the weeds and forget about that part, especially when diving deep into the latest technical matter..
What are the biggest IT challenges that you face?
A perennial focus is for our IT department to be able to deliver great business value to Tecplot, while maintaining CAPEX and OPEX costs. Lately, my focus has been to simplify our infrastructure. In the software development world, there is commonly used metaphor known as "technical debt" This often refers to code or software architectures that have a compounding penalty against future endeavors or corrections. IT infrastructures and solutions can suffer from this same ailment as well. Stephen Covey once said that "organizations are perfectly aligned to get the results that they get." It is a statement that is incredibly appropriate for IT organizations. Spend your days putting out fires with no time to advance forward, or take a step back and challenge your own assumptions on what the real problems are, or what the end result should be. The era of rethinking the delivery of solutions is here. Thanks to modern technologies, organizations large and small can and do use the very same tools. Its all about the execution.
Do you find Dell TechCenter helpful in your role?
Yes I do. Tecplot uses a lot of solutions in the Dell portfolio, including Dell blades and rack mounted servers, PowerConnect switches, and EqualLogic arrays. TechCenter has been a great resource. Over the years, having the opportunity to get to know some of the contributors online and in person through the Dell Enterprise Forums, has also helped establish a connection between an end user like myself, and those who want to help. Listening to customer feedback is something that Dell TechCenter does extremely well. Coming from a software company, I know how important this is.
What would you like to see on Dell TechCenter in the future?
I would love to see more brand awareness so that the day-to-day enterprise user knows exactly what the Dell TechCenter can do for them. Great content is king. Couple that with making it THE single location that a customer can go to in order to learn how to deploy any solution under the Dell portfolio, regardless of what product it is. I think that would be a great definition for success.
You can find Pete Koehler online at:
To see more posts from Pete relating to Dell, read the following posts:
Vroom! Scaling up Virtual Machines in vSphere to meet performance requirements
Vroom! Scaling up Virtual Machines in vSphere to meet performance requirements - part 2
Post: "Configuring a VM for SNMP monitoring using Cacti
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