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Robert Novak

Product Manager

UCS Networking

Robert Novak has been a technologist and Whovian by passion for over three decades, and a technologist by paycheck for at least two of those decades.

By day he is an engineering product manager in the Cisco UCS networking group, focused on Cisco's Virtual Interface Card (VIC) and the UCS fabric solutions. In a previous life he evangelized big data solutions and datacenter technology in the Americas Partner Organization at Cisco.

In his copious free time he operates a used computer shop and museum in Silicon Valley, performs stand-up comedy, writes about home lab and other technology adventures on his personal blog, and obsesses over coffee and smoked meats

Check out Robert's increasingly-inaccurately-named hat on Twitter at @ciscobigdatahat and visit his blog at rsts11.com

 

Articles

March 23, 2017

DATA CENTER

The Three Superpowers behind your next SAP HANA deployment

1 min read

When I started supporting enterprise application platforms at the turn of the century, the model was pretty simple: a single, huge server with expensive high-performance storage behind it. If you outgrew the storage, you could add more, and if you outgrew the server, you bought the next larger box. It was a very monolithic design, […]

January 20, 2017

DATA CENTER

It’s no use going back to yesterday’s storage platform for tomorrow’s applications

1 min read

There’s a line in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland where Alice says “It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” Some days I feel that way about my storage infrastructures as well. I fell down a particular rabbit-hole into storage management accidentally almost 20 years ago. I wouldn’t have seen […]

September 15, 2015

DATA CENTER

Tales of a Fourth-Grade Something: Big Data with Cisco & Splunk at .conf & Strata

4 min read

Someone at a meeting recently told me how cool it was that big data was finally moving out of the early adopter phase. He’s lucky I wasn’t drinking a beverage at the time, or he might have ended up wearing it. I’m accused of being sort of a unicorn when it comes to the Big Data […]

March 5, 2015

DATA CENTER

Big Data is better than a sharp stick in the eye

3 min read

Big Data is better than a sharp stick in the eye. I can say this with great authority, since I missed the first half of Strata+Hadoop World 2015 in San Jose because of the latter. But eye injuries have never kept me offline for long, and I was able to follow online with what I […]

January 27, 2014

PERSPECTIVES

Help Me Replace My Internet, So I Can Call You Over It

3 min read

I was thinking about security over the last month or two; it comes to mind pretty often when working in technology and when listening to news coverage of technology. But that’s not my topic today. I got a bit distracted. You see, when I was very young, my mother would lose her glasses regularly. While […]

January 8, 2014

PERSPECTIVES

IoE and JiT: making the future more efficient through connectivity

3 min read

If there was a developing market opportunity that would bring you $19 trillion (with a “T”), you’d probably be interested, wouldn’t you. If that market’s impact on the world–not just the technology sphere–was going to have 5-10 times the impact ten years from now as it has been since the internet’s inception, you’d want to […]

October 9, 2013

PERSPECTIVES

Security and Insecurity in the Internet of Everything

2 min read

The Internet of Everything is a big thing, and it’s going to get bigger. As more devices, sensors, gadgets, and people get interconnected, you’ll hear more and more about it. But there’s one aspect of the Internet of Everything that I don’t hear a lot about. That aspect is security, both in the form of […]