1998 to 2001

Before the Datacenter

I went to the US Merchant Marine Academy to study Marine Engineering. Which is, without much exaggeration, a glorified diesel mechanic. Along the way, you learn some electrical engineering basics, work with electric motors, welding, plumbing, playing with lathes, ya know, the good stuff a boy of a blue-collar Carolina upbringing craves.

What I didn’t expect was that the most useful skill I’d take out of that education was an instinct for power delivery systems. Because in the late 90s, while everyone was figuring out what “the internet” meant for business, someone had to set up the generators and power delivery controls outside the buildings that would eventually become data centers.

That was me.

On the side, I was helping a friend pull cables through office buildings for $10 an hour. And because I can’t help myself, I kept asking questions. What plugged in here? What does it mean when that connects there? Eighteen months of questions and SEVEN exams later, I had my MCSE 2000. Nobody planned that career arc. It just kept pulling me forward.

2001 to 2010

From clearances to VLANs

After that came federal contracting: a TS clearance thanks to the Academy, a post-9/11 world where the Patriot Act had created an explosion in data collection infrastructure, and work I’m not going to say much more about beyond that. What I can say is that it sharpened the CCNA, which led to the CCNP, and then a wild-hair move across the country to Los Angeles led to a job at IPC, a healthcare company, in 2006.

That’s when VMware entered the picture. I spent five years there virtualizing everything: Oracle, Exchange, MSSQL. Consolidating onto NetApp shared storage, building 10GbE backbones and MPLS nationwide networks across 27 sites, watching IT spend drop while capability went up. In 2010, I was invited to speak at Oracle OpenWorld on behalf of VMware on the topic of virtualizing Oracle. The room was skeptical. By the end they weren’t.

2011

How DatacenterDude happened

Around this same time, social media and blogging were taking off. I started writing publicly about the work I was doing on blogspot, and posting on this new platform called “Twitter.” Not as a career move, just because it was useful and I liked doing it. The audience found me. It was the earliest version of the community building that would bear fruit later in my career.

The domain name itself came out of frustration. Back in 2011, NetApp didn’t want to give employees control over their own blog presence on company platforms. So, a bunch of us went and built our own. I tried a lot of domains before landing on DatacenterDude.com. I couldn’t believe it was available. Little did I know that something that simple would become my entire online identity, and eventually my entire personal brand. Being a loud, visible customer turned out to be a better resume than a resume.

Being a loud, visible customer turned out to be a better resume than a resume.

2011 to 2018

Vendor Mode: Engaged

I joined NetApp in 2011. For someone that has never done it, it is near-impossible to put into words how cool it is to have influence over the products you used to use at work every day. That was my job. Influencing direction of one of the most popular VMware tools in the industry: NetApp’s Virtual Storage Console (VSC). I took this very seriously, and loved my role in the whole process dearly. That never gets old. Along the way, I started the NetApp Communities Podcast, which still lives on today as Tech ONTAP, thanks to Justin Parisi.

In 2015, I got the startup itch and really wanted to be a part of building something from the ground floor. I joined Cohesity as one of the first 50 employees while they were still in stealth mode, and helped bring them to market in late 2015. Fun fact: we built our little bronze booth at VMworld 2015 by hand with stuff we got from Amazon. It’s still exciting to see something you helped shape from nothing become a multi-billion dollar company, and I truly hope they continue to succeed. The industry will always need scrappy startups disrupting to drive innovation in the market. In the end, customers always win.

Upon my return to NetApp in 2018, the world was very different. Kubernetes had taken hold and cloud had everyone’s attention. NetApp turned the whole ship into creating first-party, native, cloud storage services in all three major cloud providers, and once again, I found myself in the throes of building and promoting some of the coolest pieces of tech in the industry.

Today, nearly a decade later, we find ourselves in a whole new era of AI. While the cloud chapter continues on, for me, it’s time for a fresh shift.

2025

Why I’m writing again

In 2025, I dedicated nearly 12 months doing almost nothing but learning about AI, specifically the foundations of inference. Not the hype. The actual stack. TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, SGLang, Dynamo, KVcache, disaggregated prefill/decode, the Pareto Frontier, tokens-per-watt. The full picture. I did that before writing a single word publicly, because I’ve seen too many people in this industry skip that step. And if I’m being completely honest, I felt a severe shortcoming in my knowledge and skillset, and the sands shifting beneath my feet.

What I ultimately found is that none of it is as foreign as it looks. The vocabulary is different. The underlying instincts are the same ones we’ve been working with for decades: efficiency, scale, cost, tradeoffs. A hypervisor is still a scheduler. A read-ahead cache is still a read-ahead cache. The math just runs faster.

This site is dedicated to the engineers who built everything that runs beneath AI and are now trying to figure out what their 20 years of experience is worth in this new world.