Data Center Automation and Operations

Automating data center operations from PXE boot to zero-touch-fleet management, runbook automation, and the path to lights-out operations.

Context Drift Kills AI Agents Before Latency Does

A few weeks ago we hit a production issue on a cloud environment — one XCP-ng host was showing IOPS contention caused by a single guest VM. The classic noisy-neighbor race condition on shared storage. The diagnostic path was obvious: cross the dom0 guest list with iostat on the host, find the VM hammering the disk, and work the problem from there. Straightforward correlation — the kind of thing an experienced operator resolves in fifteen minutes with two terminal windows. ...

Cold Aisle Trenches: You Don't Chase Lights-Out

It was 2017. We had just deployed an additional ScaleIO cluster to handle the onboarding of a new customer with hundreds of VMs. Eight nodes, each with 40 Gbps at the backend. Beautiful. Efficient. The whole rack was a work of art—Dell R740s with MD1220 expansions, bezels removed so you could see all those drives blinking in perfect synchronization. The cluster was deployed less than two weeks ago. I told the customer to “burn it.” ...