DatacenterDude

We've watched this pattern play out across four generations of enterprise IT. AI tooling is next, and this time there's nothing to repatriate.

Fifty years ago, enterprise computing lived on one box. Then the PC arrived, and we spent the next five decades distributing everything that wasn't nailed down. Client/server. Virtualization. Containers. Cloud. The mainframe became a punchline. Turns out it was just patient.

Europe is in the middle of a coordinated rebuild of the software stack out from under American hyperscaler dependency. The licensing extortion got the procurement teams' attention. The open source apps and the sovereign cloud are finally ready.

Defunct startups are selling Slack archives, Jira tickets, and email threads to AI labs for six figures. The privacy outrage and gold rush takes are missing the actual story: this is a data lifecycle failure infrastructure veterans solved 30 years ago, in a tier the SaaS vendors quietly excused themselves from governing.

"Look at the size of that thing." Eight orgs racing to orbit. A million satellite filings in a single week. The pitch only works if three things all go right.

Cloudflare's new lossless LLM compression tool isn't really an AI story. It's a storage architecture story applied to GPU memory.

A year ago I hit a moment every infrastructure veteran eventually hits. I didn't know what I was looking at. Here's what I did about it, and why your 20 years of experience matter more than ever if you start now.

AI agents don't come to your data estate on a schedule. They come when they have a question. Most object storage platforms were never designed for that access pattern. Here's what that gap means for your infrastructure, and why NetApp StorageGRID was quietly built for exactly this moment.

There's a new interface layer being standardized across the web right now. It's written in plain text. It's been quietly adopted by Anthropic, Stripe, Cloudflare, and hundreds of others. And your enterprise almost certainly doesn't have one.

$64 billion in blocked projects. A statewide moratorium in Maine. Eleven states considering similar action. The industry keeps calling this a NIMBY problem. It isn't.

Everyone's either mocking the phrase or evangelizing it. Both camps are missing the point. "Vibe coding" is a dumb name for something that's actually reshaping who gets to build software, and what your 20 years of infrastructure experience is suddenly worth in that world. I have opinions. Lots of them.

For the last two years, enterprise IT shops running hypervisor environments have been staring at a short menu of bad options. The NetApp and Nutanix alliance just added a fourth one.

The introductory issue of the DCD Dispatch newsletter. An introduction to me, where I've been, and what you can expect from subscribing.

AI isn’t primarily a UX story. It’s an infrastructure control story wearing a conversational mask, and a lot of old-school operators are more relevant to this era than they think.

After years buried in cloud, alliances, and AI infrastructure, I’m bringing DatacenterDude back online. Saltier, sharper, and with a lot more to say.