Every now and then engineers get excited – giddy even – by the words “time to upgrade.” Who doesn’t love new features, better performance, and bug fixes? But too often those words bring foreboding and trepidation, adding new – potentially complex – system changes to an already large pile of deferred tasks. In this session, SolarWinds Head Geek™ Patrick Hubbard is joined by Microsoft Cloud Advocate Lead Rick Claus for a candid conversation about required upgrades. What are the technology drivers? How do vendors work to reduce the burden for users? Moreover, you’ll learn how to streamline upgrades to get them out of the way faster and get to the real benefits of upgrading sooner.
Additional Resources
Microsoft Windows Server Upgrades Overview
Microsoft Storage Migration Service Overview
SolarWinds Customer Success Center
Presenters
Rick Claus, Cloud Advocate Lead, Microsoft
Rick engages in person and online with the worldwide IT Pro/Ops community on behalf of Microsoft. As a lead for one of the Cloud Advocate teams in Azure engineering, Rick’s role is to connect with technical communities to capture feedback on how to make things better and to share his knowledge about the ecosystem. Technical areas of expertise from his 20+ years of experience in the IT Industry include; Core Azure infrastructure services, Windows Server, systems management, and all things “cloud.” Unofficially, Rick is focused on spreading his enthusiasm, passion, and excitement on all things technical to anyone who has the time for a coffee (or pint) and a chat (in English or français – naturellement).
Patrick Hubbard, Technical Product Marketing Principal and Head Geek, SolarWinds
An accomplished technologist with over 20 years of hands-on experience, Patrick’s career includes software development, operations, product management and marketing, technology strategy, and advocacy. An unapologetic market-hype deconstructionist, Hubbard is passionate about helping front-line technology professionals learn new skills to delight, not just satisfy, users. Hubbard’s current focus is helping enterprises adopt rational cloud-native strategies that deliver the transformation business increasingly demands. Since joining SolarWinds in 2007, Hubbard has combined his technical expertise with an IT customer perspective to drive product strategy, launch the Head Geeks™, develop and manage the SolarWinds Certified Professional® (SCP) and SolarWinds® Academy Training Classes programs, and create the SolarWinds online demo platform. Today, most admins recognize Hubbard as the executive producer of the Telly award-winning SolarWinds Lab™, and SolarWinds THWACKcamp™. With code in SolarWinds products and regular application of emerging technologies, Hubbard is a frequent blogger and invited speaker for cloud, DevOps, IT, security, data center, and networking conferences.
