IVOXY Blog

Hot enough for you, Data Center Therapy listeners? Go ahead, grab a plate of ribs, corn, and green beans, and belly up to the listening picnic table, as your ears get to feast on the freshness that is Episode 94.  In this one, our sun-drenched hosts, Mr. Matt “8 Panel Chamois” Yette and Mr. Matt […]

What things Microsoft lurk in the shadows, basements, and dark closets of your I.T. organization?  Which parts of Active Directory, Exchange, or M365 keep you up at night, racked with anxiety and fear?  Is there no relief from scary upgrades and failures to be had? Fear not, loyal compatriots! Bust out your flashlights, proton packs, […]

Welcome back for another new episode, Data Center Therapy aficionados!  This week, our adventurous and hard-working hosts, Matt “Master Link” Yette and Matt “Chromed Crankset” Cozzolino open up the virtual studios to IVOXY’s own Ryan “Security Gusset” Grelck, who joins the fellas to talk all things endpoint-related for the first part of the podcast. In […]

Welcome back, long-awaiting listeners, as your favorite IT podcast with a healthy dose of empathy, Data Center Therapy, returns after a seven-month hiatus.  It’s been too long, we know, but we’re back and we’re recharged so we can bring you the first of many new episodes with exciting, topical and relevant content.  Thanks for joining […]

Welcome back, loyal Data Center Therapy listeners!  As summer gives way to fall, we’re dropping another fresh and topical episode onto the hot podcast grill for your informational delight (with a dash of fun thrown in for good measure.)  Your host, Mr. Matt “My Stack Overflowed” Cozzolino joins IVOXY End User Compute specialists Ryan “Universal […]

Welcome back to another exciting episode of Data Center Therapy, where the digital device management seas are stormy but the DCT deck crew are always ready for a challenge!  While Matt ‘Hard to Starboard’ Cozzolino is out on PTO this week, your reliable and experienced Captain, Mr. Matt ‘Engines Steady at Quarter Impulse’ Yette welcomes […]

Welcome back to another installment of your favorite IT podcast with a healthy dose of empathy, Data Center Therapy. On this episode Matt ‘Mouse Master’ Yette and Matt ‘4K before 4K was cool’ Cozzolino invite VDI expert and all-around VMware guru Mr. Ryan Grelck back to the virtual studios.  Ryan shares the latest and greatest developments […]

You’re a one-person wrecking crew. You rock your compute infrastructure, your hypervisor and virtual machine management system, and your storage subsystems, but you’ll admit, you could use some help with the networking side every once in a while.  In fact, every now and again, something happens on the network and you never can quite get […]

It’s a been a little while, but your favorite, most empathetic, most wise and most entertaining IT therapists are back in the office to look at all things vSphere 8.  In this episode of Data Center Therapy, your intrepid hosts Matt ‘Pi before Pi was cool’ Yette and Matt ‘Distributed Everything Si-fu’ Cozzolino teach you with their technology equivalents of the martial art of Wing Chun on what’s new with vSphere 8.  

The Matts are back, baby! Your intrepid Data Center Therapy hosts, Mr. Matt ‘He sings the bass’ Yette, and Mr. Matt ‘He sings the tenor’ Cozzolino have returned!  The Matts welcome IVOXY’s own End-User Compute specialist Mr. Hoppy Shaw back to the DCT virtual studios.  Hoppy once again regales you, our audience, with stories of his time […]

Inside the virtual studios of DCT on this episode, our intrepid hosts welcome Darla Teeter, Global Solutions Architect from ProofPoint to talk about email security in a depth and breadth that you might not have thought possible. Along the precarious, dangerous, do-not-click-here dark alleys of their email security discussion, the Matts and Darla discuss:

On this episode, your hosts Matt “Release and Report” Yette and Matt “Reverse Lookup” Cozzolino break down email security for you, our listeners, with a little history, a little humor, and a little education around all those three, five and six letter acronyms.

This week, it's all about Graphics Processing Units. We'll talk about what GPUs actually do, how they changed PCs and gaming, who the current players are in the GPU marketing, and what kinds of applications they can be used for.

We welcome Shane back to the DCT virtual studios to talk about the new Advanced vSphere class he’s been working studiously on for the past few months. 

Cliched though it may be, it’s true: It’s not if you’re going to experience a ransomware attack, it’s just a matter of when. What can you do to prepare for it? Quinton and the Matts waste no time and begin to prescribe steps you can take to harden your environment, instrument your infrastructure, and shorten the time to restore when something happens to your data.

This week it's all about multi-factor authentication, identity management, device compliance and control, mobile device management solutions, Active Directory to Azure migrations, and much, much more.

If you thought you knew everything about what you can do with your phone and a mapping app, think again! Diehard campers, off-road enthusiasts, powder hounds, and Apple Fanfolks this episode is for you. We're going deep into the mapping application rabbit hole and the talking MacOS evolution.

Data is the final pillar of completing a Zero Trust Journey largely because its viability is dependent on other pillars. That said, data is also one of the most challenging pieces due to the inherent nature of data and people. Let's talk about what securing your data and implementing those systems can look like.

It can't all be datacenters, cloud computing, and cybersecurity around here. We have hobbies too. This week we move from our home offices to our home garages to talk 3D printing.

This week IVOXY’s own Kris Lamet returns to the virtual DCT studios, this time employed at NetApp as their Technical Partner Manager for the PNW and Western Canada. We'll talk NetApp and cloud, of course - but we couldn't resist, there's some home automation in there too.

Join us on this special episode of Data Center Therapy where we welcome the newest member of the IVOXY family, Security Consultant Quinton Barber. 

Come on a retro journey with the IVOXY gang as they share their thoughts on their favorite games of years past. But first, the guys touch on VMware deprecating the use of USB and SD card boot devices for the ESXi Hypervisor.

VMware customers, listen up! If you're running your ESXi installs using an SD card or USB drive, it's time to stop what you're doing and make a change.

In this quick bite of an episode, we're talking Artificial Intelligence, the Metaverse, 3D movies and Washington state drivers.

In this episode of Data Center Therapy, we share tips on optimizing your work from home setup, from your seating all the way up to network segmentation and home backups.

Who oversees, tactically and day to day, mitigating your security risk? If the person you thought of is someone whose primary job is to do something else...then, my friends, I worry that the real answer is “Nobody”. What’s limiting us from doing the right thing?

We are up to version 2.17 of the log4j library that is currently considered “fixed”, but at this point a lot of folks are still wondering a very key question: am I vulnerable; how do I know? Read on to see how Rubrik customers can get a very straightforward answer to that.

This week we are honored to have Nicolas Chaillan - the USA's first Air Force and Space Force Chief Software Officer in the Data Center Therapy Studios. Nicolas shares his background, how his career at the DoD evolved, and what he sees in the future of cyber-warfare and security.

Are you looking for more information on the log4j vulnerability and wondering if your company is at risk? Read on to find out what's going on, what to look for, and how to stay safe out there.

This week, we welcome IVOXY's founder, Mr. Eric Watson, to learn from his unique, broad perspective on the supply chain conundrum. We'll touch on what IVOXY is currently doing to help our customers when availability and lead times affect the solutions we design and implement.

We're talking 2022, dear listeners! Everything from Linux as a desktop OS, ransomware, and transparent network virtualization technologies. Oh, and if you’re into Dune, Star Wars, Fallout, or the Half-Life series, there’s definitely something here for you too.

In this episode we welcome a one Mr. Hoppy Shaw, our newest IVOXY Consultant and End User Compute Specialist Extraordinaire to the virtual studios. Hoppy shares his background, his experiences with Endpoint Configuration Manager and Workspace One, as well as an impeccable knowledge of the whole desktop, laptop, and mobile device management landscape.

The Matts talk about Home Assistant and HomeKit here, but this time, it comes loaded with stories about compromises (for the sake of home automation) and the “buyer beware!” security implications of the technologies they’ve played with. 

This week we welcome to the virtual studios Jon Nelson, Global Field Solutions Engineer from VMware’s Carbon Black. Jon and the Matts talk ransomware and how you can be proactive instead of reactive.

The DCT Duo get into the nuts and bolts of how firewalls have evolved over the years and discuss how your company’s most critical data can be corralled INSIDE your network with the right set of tools.

The intrepid DCT Duo has a quick and fun but also informative podcast all around Information Technology Security this week.

This week we welcome to the virtual studios Doug Abbott, Senior Investigator for Brand Protection at Cisco.  Doug and the Matts talk about many of the different ways Cisco gear can be counterfeited.

After a short summer hiatus, hosts Matt “If you’re from Chicago, fight me!” Yette and Matt “Free Chimenea” Cozzolino return to the virtual Data Center Therapy studios to record another fun and casual podcast about all things Smart Home.

Our very own vSphere Guru and Senior IVOXY Consultant Shane Bradley is back in the virtual studio!

What is Bitcoin?  What’s Dogecoin (pronounced dohj-coin)?  For that matter, what the heck is cryptocurrency?  What’s it useful for?  Why is the price of it so volatile?

This week it's all about Multi-Factor Authentication! There's talk about biometrics, authenticator apps, USB keys, and of course the super secret sticky note hidden under the keyboard.

This week we're joined by our Senior Network Consultant and Engineering Manager Mack Nethkin to talk about all things Software-Defined Wide Area Network, or SD-WAN it’s come to be known.

This week we're going short and sweet with a little introduction to traditional firewalling, Micro-Segmentation, and Zero Trust concepts in the IT world.

End-user computing and virtual desktop administrators: You may rejoice as IVOXY VDI Senior Consultant Ryan Grelck returns to the virtual studio of Data Center Therapy.

Set the gadget geek dial to 100% for this Data Center Therapy episode. We're talking about everybody’s favorite post-lockdown hobby tech - Home Automation.

Proud family that we are, IVOXY formally invites you to tune into this special episode of Data Center Therapy, where our hosts Matt “LAN party” Yette and Matt “Beard Ambassador” Cozzolino welcome Network Consultant Joe Lentz to the virtual DCT studio.

This week we here at Data Center Therapy we’re bringing you the ultimate conclusion of the IVOXY On-Demand Lab podcast series, where the subject is all things HashiCorp Terraform.

If the acronym “API” excites you, the phrase “software-defined infrastructure” tickles your fancy, or if skating to where the puck is going is your MO, come hear Dave share what’s coming down the pike from Cisco across networking, hyper-converged and computing solutions.

Need a quick break from work? On this episode of Data Center Therapy we've just got fun water cooler topics like TV shows, home improvements and delicious beef dinners.

This week Keith astounds and delights the systems folks as well as the network infrastructure die-hards on this episode as he gives details on the parts and pieces needed to command, control and deploy a network from scratch.

Our intrepid hosts welcome back to the virtual studios IVOXY’s very own Ryan "Magnum VDI" Grelck to talk about a smorgasbord full of Horizon topics, including how it has changed and how it’s been implemented in our On-Demand Lab.

Our series reaches new depths as the guys discuss nesting NSX-T instances, GNS3 integration into the lab, and why on-prem solutions like vSphere & NSX-T are convergently evolving towards the DevOps space.

We welcome back Shane to share how our On-Demand Lab was conceived, sized and configured. Topics include the evolution from VMware Workstation virtual machine to full-on co-located infrastructure, NSX-T, Nested ESXi, Terraform, TrueNAS, ESXi on Arm and more.

This episode is the first of our new series. Matt & Matt discuss how the new IVOXY lab was designed, how it was implemented, the things it can do, where it’ll go in the future and what it all means to you!

VMworld 2020 REDUX is fast approaching! We hosted the first event on October 20th and wanted to prep you for the second on November 5th with some FAQs and answers. If your question isn’t answered here, there’s a form at the bottom for you to ask us directly. We’re always available and happy to help!

We welcome back Alec Taylor who joined Matt & Matt live at REDUX, sharing his camaraderie and technical perspective on topics like ESXi-on-ARM, DR testing, Carbon Black and active-active data centers.

Alec's got his crystal ball and he's giving you a peek! With VMworld squarely in the rear-view mirror, we're looking forward at what all the big announcements will actually mean to you and your organization.

It’s the people and the processes that make that classic IVOXY data center refresh and network optimization magic happen. We invited Jenn & Dan from our Project Management Office to discuss how we approach projects with our customers.

Remember Tim & Wilson catching up across the fence on Home Improvement? This episode feels a lot like that! It's a holiday week, so the Matt & Matt slowed things down a bit to catch up on a potpourri of personal and semi-technical topics.

We welcomed in Neil (our multi-talented Systems and Storage Consultant) to share some thoughts on how to approach DR planning, what kinds of tools there are to automate testing & failover of recovery plans, and how the disaster recovery landscape has changed over the years.

This week the guys welcome our End-User Compute Specialist, David, back into the studio to give you the 30,000 foot view (and relative firehose) of the just announced VMware Horizon 8 announcements.

Yette and Cozz dive into a root cause analysis of the recent F5 vulnerability while also educating listeners on things like two-factor authentication missteps, social engineering goofs, and the dangers of running multiple application & web servers from different codebases on your servers.

Whether you are already an expert in YAML, Python, Terraform, or Ansible; or you're just trying to wrap your head around when network automation even makes sense, Alec & the guys have something for you in this episode.

Decades in you’d think the storage protocol landscape would tilt in a particular direction – but respected data center pros like Matt & Matt still duke it out on the storage battlefield and on this episode they build their respective cases for their preferred protocols & practices.

Our automation and network guru, Keith, stopped by to share about routing and the Border Gateway Protocol, including an incident with the country of Pakistan and YouTube that illuminates how BGP can be compromised.

You might remember Jason from his time at IVOXY – he's back to share what he's been working on in the Emerging Technologies division at Rubrik (a startup-within-a-startup!) Spoiler alert: topics include compliance, ransomware, & COVID-19 implications on our industry.

For our inaugural #Live episode we brought back former Data Center Therapy co-host Chris Crow who cooked up a big ‘ole plate of storage appetizer topics to help educate listeners about new flash technologies like vVols, wear-leveling, host PCI-Express busses, NVMe, etc. 

Our resident VMware trailblazer, Shane, stopped by dive into some of the new features, gotchas, & surprises in the big new release including container orchestration, new UI display options, licencing changes, plus enhancements to vMotion and Distributed Resource Scheduler.

This episode is all about greenfielding something fresh with no real consequences to your IT job: home automation. The Matts riff on HomeKit making way for Home Assistant, Raspberry Pi Zero W devices, The Z-Wave protocol, Node Red …and a slew of other home automation topics.

Whether you’d like to learn a bit about NSX-T 3.0, how upgrades on certain critical command-and-control mechanisms in your virtual environment impacts hosts & VMs, or why load balancers can be worth their weight in digital gold, there’s something for everyone in this episode!

We invited our VDI Specialist, David, into the studio to share his perspective on remote work strategies in this new normal.. and by studio, we mean 100% remote conferencing because here at IVOXY Consulting we were practicing social distancing long before it was hip.

What a few weeks it’s been. You’re probably more than ready to vent and share your pain (both physical and mental) with the Data Center Therapy crew. So crank up the volume and take comfort in knowing that Matt Yette and Matt Cozzolino are in it with you on this week’s WFH edition of DCT.

We're doubling down on networking to address all those questions hanging out there: What are good practices for setting up ESXi and vSphere networking? Should I put management vmkernel ports on Standard or Distributed virtual switches? Nexus or Catalyst switching? ...and much more – have a listen to find out!

Jeremy and the guys spend some time talking through networking best practices for small to medium-sized organizations, including some products & features that can really help secure servers & systems from diabolical attackers and feckless users alike.

2020 is off to a roaring start! Learn how our intrepid hosts balance the demands of delivering services, refreshing our internal IVOXY lab infrastructure and helping the team get ready for our upcoming Kubernetes classes.

For this milestone episode, we thought we would catch up with our co-founder, Alec, to share a bit about our virtualization-driven genesis, 14 years of evolution, and where we believe IT is headed next.

IaC borrows a methodology from developers and applies it to infrastructure. This week Matt & Matt make a New Year's resolution to work smarter, not harder by harnessing the efficiencies of Infrastructure as Code.

It’s well known that the Home Automation space is very fragmented with all the competing ecosystems and technologies out there, so this week our intrepid technology sherpas thought it'd be fun to break down the possible options & integrations for our listeners.

Matt & Matt open up their toolboxes to share their favorite widgets, dongles, and gear that help them get their dirty data center jobs done right.

We welcome Jeff (NetApp) to dive into the revelations shared from the mothership at INSIGHT 2019. The conucopia of topics include disaggregated HCI, NetApp's Data Fabric vision, and new hardware products like the AFF A400 array.

Here comes a deep dive discussion that should prove informative and entertaining to all IT pros – container-savvy or not! Whether you’re interested in repeatability, scalability, or orchestration, there are some neat advantages containers have versus “we’ve always done it this way” deployment practices.

The guys just got back from the Pure//Accelerate conference in Austin + the Rubrik Tech Summit in Denver, and they have everything you need to know. Oh, plus they've got first-hand accounts of high-speed electric scootering and some TV show tips.

Ryan & Kris join Yette to share their experiences and initial reactions from VMworld 2019. Carbon Black, Project Pacific, Tanzu, and Pivotal Container Services headline a conversation that is ultimately an appetizer for our biggest event of the year.

The gloves come off this week as the Matts invite David, a true EUC specialist, into our studios to debate the pros & cons of a hotly contested technology: Hyper-Converged Infrastructure.

With VMworld right around the corner, Alec joins the guys to kick around predictions and share about some can't-miss parties as well as tease our VMworld Redux coming this fall!

Yette welcomes our Founding Partner, Alec, to the podcast to talk all things virtual machines: Things like NUMA & vNUMA, why DIMMs might not be optimally placed, how VMware's evolution of multi-core & multi-socket CPU hardware impact your VMs, and much more!

It’s time to LVtMCEaaS (Live Vicariously through Mack’s Conference Experience as a Service) as we dive into the developments and products announced at last month's show.

On this episode we discuss our home lab and automation setups, as well as the smart home software and hardware we use to help make life that much geekier.

Short & sweet this week! Cozz was recently joined by our very own Kris Lamet & Alec Taylor for an impromptu Q&A about the future of NSX.

We cover a lot this week including network virtualization & the software-defined datacenter, vRealize Log Insight, and all things 6.7 Update 2: Spectre / Meltdown, new config maximums for VMs, and more!

Our conversation with Rebecca (Rubrik, Inc.) centers on the evolution of APIs, and how newer technologies like Swagger, GraphQL, PowerShell, etc. are revolutionizing the way our software interacts with other components & infrastructure in the modern data center.

This week Matt & Matt cover the 5 W's & the H of containers – most importantly WHEN you should be implementing them and HOW they tie into the new world of cloud-hosted infrastructure. Have a listen!

Ready or not! Are you being pushed to deploy a cloud-first strategy? Jonas (Pure Storage) brings his extensive cloud acumen to bear, discussing the hybrid consumption models that are helping organizations bridge the gap.

Take a 10,000-foot Pacific Northwest view of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) to get a handle on your disaster recovery plans and archival strategy as we explore the cloudy side of the data center. 

Join us for a self-declared FUD-free 32 minutes where you’ll get to know a little more about our Network Practice Leader Mack, the evolution of malware and ransomware, and how you can reduce and eliminate risk in your environment.

Pull up a barstool – this week we're in person with beers in hand! Chris and Matt got to sit down and discuss the many benefits and use cases for upgrading your infrastructure with VMware NSX.

Everybody's talking about automating, but where to start? For the past several years Chris has been helping server admins and broader IT teams bring that time way down by implementing IaaS. On today's episode he talks through many of the ins and outs.

We are joined this week by our resident security expert, Matt Cozzolino, to talk all things Palo Alto Networks. Listen now to learn more about the technology and how you can experience it for yourself with the Security Lifecycle Review.

This week, IVOXY Engineer Ryan Grelck visits the podcast to discuss VMware Horizon View 7.5 features like App Volumes, User Environment Manager (UEM), Just-in-Time Management Platform (JPM), Instant Clones, and more!

With so many new features on vSphere 6.7, Matt & Chris dig into a few more of the new top features like VMware Platform Services Controller, changes to the vSAN UNMAP priority caps, and the switch from C# & Flash clients to HTML5 for managing NSX, VUM, vSAN, etc.

In our inaugural episode of Data Center Therapy, Matt & Chris discuss the new features of vSphere 6.7 like instant clone APIs, Per-VM EVC and ESXi reload without entire host reboot. There is a lot to factor in when considering an upgrade, so be sure to listen!