RedMonkTV

Michael gives us an overview of ZipTie, including it's origin and how it ties into AlterPoint's commercial product, Network Authority. Ryan then jumps in to show us the initial discovery, admin setup, and poking around in the resulting inventory.

Background: A little while ago, I sat down with ZipTie's Michael Nels and Ryan Kruse for a detailed demo of ZipTie, the open source network inventory and configuration management tool. That is, ZipTie scans all the devices on your network, figures out what they are, what's running on them, and then gives you the ability to backup and change the network-oriented configuration for each device (it doesn't dip into the application layer, for example, configuring Exchange).

Disclosure: AlterPoint is a client and sponsored this screencast.

Disclosure: Managed Objects is a client and sponsored this screencast.

Back a the IBM zSummit, James also had the chance to talk with IBM's John Shedletsky on a wide range of contemporary mainframe topics, primarily, about using the multi-hosting (to put it in "distributed" terms) abilities that mainframes to bring to drive consolidation benefits. The interesting angles here are that John and James get detailed into much of the "mainframes have been doing it for years" talk that's been going around with the rise of virtualization.

John does a good job of explaining how mainframes have been built, for decades, to be fault-tolerate, scale-up environments. Along they way, he takes the chance to point out similarities to recent efforts like "shipping container computing" and other modern efforts to replicate mainframe functionality.