Welcome to EtherBacon! What does EtherBacon mean you ask? Well, I love bacon, and the rest of it just sounded catchy. Mikedent.com and mikedent.net were already taken, so this was up next.

I’ve been toying with starting a blog for many years now, but always thought eh, why. I’ve been in the IT industry officially since 1997/98, but always knew that computers would be my first job – confirmed by some 1st grade homework.

About Me: I live outside of Columbia, SC with my incredible wife and 2 dogs. I started my career testing out a proprietary billing system using TOAD to run scripts against an Oracle database and figured wow, people are paying me to do this! I graduated to supporting EMR Systems and Citrix farms for a large hospital in VA, moved onto work for General Electric for a while where I really took off with Virtualization, Unix and Oracle systems. After bouncing around a bit and coming back to GE, I decided to go work for a smaller company – eGroup, that has been an incredible 5 year journey now.

About MeOutside of work, everything for me revolves around my wife, my dogs and trying to remain actually athletic to some extent with Crossfit. Since I played college football at Bridgewater College, they instilled a love of picking up and putting down heavy things, so I get to keep doing that at CrossFit Creed, surrounded by a great group of people. I also get to work out with my wife, and she pushes me more than anybody else, while getting the rewarding experience of coaching a few classes weekly – helping people on their fitness journey.

My wife has learned to expect gear coming and going from the garage rack, and the hum of servers in the garage has become a great topic of conversation with neighbors.

Career Focus: While my career really started off with Citrix, I’ve now ventured into the Cisco Data Center world, and keep focus on VMware, EMC, PureStorage, Nutanix – yeah the hot buttons. I try to keep one leg into the devops world as well, knowing that while the industry and times change, my career does as well.

I’ve tried to keep a very broad range of skill sets, from Storage to Virtualization to End User computing to whatever comes my way. I’ve been fortunate to have been granted vExpert status every year since 2014, have presented on a variety of topics such as vRealize Automation at the Carolinas VMUG Summit in 2014 and 2015 and Cisco ACI. The last 2 years I’ve also been honored to be part of the Nutanix Technology Champions group.

I’ve been fortunate to achieve a number of certifications over my career, from the VMware VCP Virtualization, Desktop and NSX certs, to the Cisco CCNA DC, CCNP DC, CCDA, and others.

Usual Disclaimer! The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the postings, strategies or opinions of eGroup.