“Because it’s there.” These were the immortal words of George Mallory made famous before his ill-fated attempt up Mt. Everest during the 1920’s. As a self-described armchair mountaineer, I’ve followed many of the Himalayan mountain expeditions, especially the more contemporary folks like Ed Viesturs, Conrad Anker and Jimmy Chin. While I am no real mountaineer myself, I have a deep love for the mountains – the fresh air, the vistas, the escape, the adventure and yes, even the victory of reaching the summit! And I have the great blessing of sharing this love with my wife. Here we are enjoying a celebratory moment on the top of Mt. Washington many years ago on our honeymoon! What a high point on an already exhilarating time of our lives!

As it turns out, this morning as I type this, I’m on vacation with my family up in the Great Smoky Mountains. I’m looking out over the lower peaks full of lush hemlocks, oak and rhododendron. Feeling the cool morning mountain air, taking in the majesty of God’s creation, and enjoying the escape of the hustle and bustle of our hectic lives – Ah, it’s so good to be up here!

So why share all of this on my blog? I just recently launched a revamped version of my old blog site, briantrainor.wordpress.com. Deciding I needed a catchier title and a site where I would be excited about posting regular content, I dubbed this one MountVirtual.com. I want this to be a site where I can document my own journey and experiences as I climb the peaks of my own profession as a data center engineer/architect. This field is changing fast. I’ve been in IT for over 16 years and to attempt to describe how the data center landscape has changed during this time would be sorely insufficient. I latched onto server virtualization almost seven years ago, a technology which single-handedly changed how we design and operate data centers these days. Information Technology has always been by nature, a realm of fast advances and progress. So with it come the challenges of keeping up and staying current with these latest advances, which makes it all the more exciting and rewarding!

In the coming weeks and months, I will be sharing my own experiences as I tackle infrastructure technology such as VMware optimization and operations, storage, UCS and Cisco networking. These are just a few of the areas that I’ve been spending a lot of my time. My goal is to get out at least one post per week to share these experiences. I’ll see how long I can keep this up.

I invite you to come along for the journey!