Tech Toolbox: The Stack Starts Here!

Welcome to CCB’s Tech Toolbox – a technical behind-the-scenes pass into how we design, build, and help run & maintain the infrastructure that powers today’s businesses. I’m Jacob Turowski, VP of IT Services at CCB. I’ve worked in the IT field for nearly 20 years, have a passion for technology and helping others. Whether you are a network wizard, a server sorcerer, or just a caffeine-powered IT director, this one’s for you.

In this newsletter we want to dive deeper into the technical details that drive architecture and deployment decisions, highlight some wins and gotchas we’ve hit along the way, and hopefully help add to your knowledge base.

Every Sysadmin has a story – and I'm here to share some of ours!

We’re aiming at keeping it:

• Technical enough for sysadmins, network administrators, and IT directors
• Clear enough to share with your boss
• Sprinkled with just enough humor to make patch Tuesday survivable

Some quick housekeeping: In the world of IT, there is no shortage of acronyms: DNS, DHCP, IPS/IDS, VM, NPS, EDR, MDR, XDR, SIEM, ACL, ARP, SOC, NOC, CIDR, CLI, VLAN – if any on that list are new or unfamiliar, that’s ok. We all have varying levels of experience and exposure. But given our target audience, there are going to be acronyms and topics covered that may not be fully explained.

First, if you’re ever unsure – please ask! We’re happy to help break something down further if needed, to allow for better understanding of the topic. Second, as any practiced IT professional knows, a fair amount of troubleshooting involves knowing how and what to search for. So, if something is new or unknown to you, brush up on that Google-Fu and see what you can discover on your own. Research, trial and error, along with asking questions, are all part of the learning journey; and as a life-long learner, asking questions and hands-on discovery are some of my favorite parts.

With that out of the way, grab your coffee, energy drink, or caffeinated beverage of choice, and let’s jump in.

In coming releases, we will explore different areas of our tech stack, why we chose the technology that we did, and how we feel it can help businesses accomplish their goals. We wanted to use this first release to set the stage for what this newsletter is all about but didn’t want you to wait until the next release to know some of what content we were going to be covering.

So, here is my segue into our first set of topics covering Servers, Scale Computing, and Hyperconverged Infrastructure.

While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to building out an environment, there are often similarities. One common requirement is the need for server infrastructure. Today’s server workload is highly virtualized, and there is no shortage of options out there. From open-source offerings like Proxmox, to long standing options like Hyper-V and VMware – they all provide a way to host your VM workload. For our own internal workload, and for our clients, we went with Scale Computing’s HC3 platform. Using the Scale Platform, we’ve been able to cover workloads of 30+ VMs, all the way down to cloud native environments that have those 1-2 legacy servers that still need to be in your on-prem environment.

So why Scale? We evaluated multiple HCI vendors. We chose Scale for three reasons:

1. Simplicity without compromise: No separate hypervisor licensing. No SAN. A cluster that just works. This has never been more important than right now with the headache Broadcom created with their purchase of VMware.
2. Scalability AKA Right-sized for the real world: Unlike big-enterprise HCI platforms, Scale fits SMB and mid-market IT without overkill. It supports large, multi-site deployments, all the way down to single-site, single node deployments. And you get the benefit regardless of what you deploy.
3. Built-in Protection and Ease of Use: Native snapshots, failover, and replication let us protect workloads without bolting on multiple different tools. And you can do it all without needing to understand the difference between a vSwitch and a Distributed vSwitch (and the different licensing requirements needed for the varying options).

In our next edition, we’ll unpack some of the Data Protection features on the Scale Platform, how we use them, as well as some decisions and factors that go into building out a Scale deployment.

TL;DR – too long, didn’t read:

• This newsletter is for 𝚗̶𝚎̶𝚛̶𝚍̶𝚜̶ tech people (I am one, so I feel I can say that).
• We’re going to review CCB’s tech stack and how we landed on what we deploy.
• We’re going to dive deeper into design concepts, architecture decisions, wins/losses/gotchas of real-world deployments.

At CCB Technology, we’re here to help you build a tech stack that fits—no fluff, just what works best for your business. Let us know how we can help.

Got feedback on the newsletter? Tell us what you want more (or less) of.