Three IT podcasts and blogs that need to exist

Here are three IT-oriented podcasts and/or blogs that I think need to exist. I don’t really have the time or obsession to start these, but I think there’s an audience for all of them. Your version may not quite look like mine, but if you’ve been thinking in any of these directions, I encourage you to go start something. I’d be happy to help however I can.

1. A weekly podcast that’s just some IT folks talking to each other. See Accidental Tech Podcast and The Talk Show, both more-or-less for the Mac crowd, or anything on the 5by5 Podcast Network. Among the many IT-oriented podcasts, we’ve got Speaking in Tech, which is kinda-sorta the tech news of the week; and we’ve got the Cloudcast, which is the cloud interview of the week. I really enjoy these podcasts but there’s a cultural vibe or lineage coming out of that Mac-NYC-Austin-web designer axis that I can’t quite put my finger on but I’d love to hear reflected in my infrastructure-oriented world. The podcasts are really quite long, rarely have interviews per se, and they don’t really cover “tech news” in a professional way — they’re mostly just opinionated people talking about what’s going on in the industry and their work. It’s actually a little like eavesdropping on a conversation going on at the next table in a techie cafe. It’s possible that for IT we could benefit from some journalists or analysts being involved who are paid to pay attention and have opinions, but I don’t think the people involved necessarily need to be IT blog celebrities and I’m sure as hell they shouldn’t be tech executives, but they do need to be people who have an opinion on a lot of things and can’t shut up.

2. A blog or podcast that covers home labs. Home labs are hugely interesting to a lot of people. Technologists use them while studying for certs, gaining experience, writing blog posts and books, and just generally screwing around. There’s enough material there to fill a weekly podcast, easily: Current strategies for obtaining gear. What old gear is coming on the market. Minimizing noise and power draw. New form factors and low-power servers. Software like Fusion, Workstation, VirtualBox, Docker, Vagrant, Puppet. White box servers and networking gear. Commercial and home-grade SSDs. Commercial and home-grade NASes, open source and proprietary. Compatibility matrices. You can dip into specifics about nested vSphere. All sorts of Microsoft topics – from certs to Windows Server to apps. See, you’ve got your first six months of topics already.

3. A blog that covers flash in the data center. Every time I talk about flash and SSDs on my podcast, people are really interested in the minutia of what’s on the market now, where the gear is going, and who is doing what with it; but there’s no single good place to follow the latest news. The world of flash is moving fast. You can follow SSD news at sites like StorageSearch.com and The SSD Review and AnandTech. (BTW StorageSearch should not be confused with SearchStorage. The former is old-school obsessive geekery rockin’ a 90’s website while the latter is another site from the fine folks at TechTarget.) We need an obsessive geek to follow that news and translate that into how IT is using this technology and and how to think about and navigate the wide array of flash in the data center –in  all-flash arrays, hybrid arrays, and as local storage in servers in all flavors — primary storage, cache, distributed storage, etc. A good example article is Vijay Swami’s Buyer’s Guide for the All Flash Array Market.  We need one place to follow all the product releases, technology updates, analyst reports, and make fun of all the press releases. Alessandro Perilli used to do this for the virtualization industry at a whole, and now he’s writing smart things at Gartner, so it could be a good career thing.

I’ve got a longer list of things that should exist, but these three have been bugging me for a while. Since this is really a plea to the lazyweb, I’ll just stop here after planting this seed and see if anything sprouts. If you grow any interesting plants let me know.

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