About

My name is Raymond Phoon and I am the Senior Cloud Architect for the Azure Practice at Macquarie Cloud Services which is one of the largest hosting service providers in Australia.

I have experience in the following technologies:

• Microsoft Azure – helping customers design the appropriate solution to fit their requirements in Azure as well as hybrid cloud.
• Virtualization – VMware vCloud Director, Horizon View.
• Networking – VMware NSX, Cisco Nexus product families including Nexus 9000 and 7700 series.
• Compute – Cisco UCS, Dell EMC PowerEdge, HP ProLiant series.
• Hyper-Converged – Cisco HyperFlex, VMware vSAN.

The slogan of my blog is “Keeping IT Real!!”.  As IT professionals, we hear a lot of marketing material making large claims of product capabilities. Sometimes these claims are true but most of us know all too well that marketing material sometimes stretches the truth. Personally I take any marketing claim “with a grain of salt” until I experience them first hand.

However, there are times when we need to take a leap of faith and accept some claims. One of these is scalability. There is no way that we can verify claims of a product’s scalability and just have to trust the vendor. Scalability may not be an issue with most enterprises but is crucial in the service provider world which is why we always go with trusted vendors.

The aim of this blog is provide a unbiased view of products that I have had the benefit of testing or managing and as a way of giving something back to the IT community.

Disclaimer

The views expressed anywhere on this site are strictly mine and not the opinions and views of my employer or any vendor mentioned.