Introduction to RPA

The acronym RPA, which stands for “Robotic Process Automation”, identifies a relatively young type of technology that is becoming more and more popular across the IT industry. While RPA solutions have been available on the market for almost two decades now, their level of maturity has reached a point where they are now widely adopted in almost any business area.

But what is the purpose of RPA? To condense it in just a few lines: RPA is a set of technologies and tools that aims at multiplying the effectiveness of human workers by partnering them with a digital counterpart capable of automating or augmenting the execution of any type of workflow or business process.

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This post is a follow-up to my previous one written in August after my participation to Cloud Field Day 4. In that post, after a brief introduction of Cohesity and the problems their technology solves, I went deep dive on the Cloud-specific features showcased at CFD4.

As a matter of fact, just a few days after returning from CFD4, Cohesity made an impactful announcement, presenting Cohesity Helios. Back then I did not have the time to look into the announcement and write about Helios, but attending a private briefing (presented by Rawlinson Rivera) at VMworld Europe 2018 gave me the opportunity to focus on the solution and briefly report about it.

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OpenIO is a very young company with a history already behind it: although on the market only since 2015, the company’s founders started developing the core technology back in 2006, as part of a project for a major Telco. The code was open-sourced in 2012, then forked and finally productized and presented to customers in its current form. OpenIO is based in Lille, France, with offices in San Francisco and Tokyo and plans for expansion in the next coming months.

OpenIO’s proposition could be quickly and very unfairly labeled as YAOSS – Yet Another Object Storage Solution, while in reality it is way more than just that. To better understand why, let’s start from a very high level description of the current state of the storage market, the typical use cases for object storage systems and how they are quickly evolving.

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LOGO1Starting next Monday, Sept. 29th, I will start a new chapter of my professional life: I will be joining VMware as a PSO Consultant in the Rome office.

I am very excited and grateful for the opportunity: for many reasons VMware has always been a dream destination for me. Now this is finally happening and I am sure there is going to be a lot of hard work ahead, long hours, head down on books and manuals – especially during the first weeks – to be able to quickly grasp the wealth of incredible technologies I will help to implement for our customers.

But this is also what will make this new adventure the most important one so far for me: since I started my journey with virtualization, this is where I always wanted to be.

I hope that also this blog will benefit from the experience that I will be gaining in the next few months: expect more and more technical content on these pages.

Before I turn this page, let me say a heartfelt thank you to my past employer, CTERA Networks. It was a great ride with very special people and I wish the company all the best. I am definitely a better professional thanks to what I have learned from them.

It’s been one year since my last post on this blog and here I am again, with a little update.

A lot has happened during the last year both in my personal and professional life, and this somehow explains why this blog has been neglected…

To recap quicky… I left the United Nations after seven years, I was supposed to move to London to work for a major Cloud Service Provider but… it did not happen. Don’t ask…  :-/

I ended up in Rome instead and I have been working as a consultant in the private sector. At the moment I am focusing on personal and professional development and preparing myself for the next career move. Which I do really hope will come soon.

What else happened?

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I have an Ubuntu 10.10 “home server” at home which I use as my home network file server, torrent box and for backup/sync with various laptops. Besides the 500 GB disk that contains the OS, I have 4x 1TB disks configured as a RAID 5 Volume with mdadm, where all my digital life is stored.Having a quad core Xeon beast with 16 GB of RAM to run this, seemed to me like an overkill and I was playing with the idea of installing Windows 7 instead of Ubuntu so that I could also push the GPU performance to its max and do some serious gaming on this machine while serving files and torrenting.

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