A List for 2016

I have a few objectives this year and I've decided that I'll leverage the accountability of the Internet to keep me honest and on track.  I tend to be more purposeful when I write them out, and this helps me stay reminded of the long-term goals for the year in the midst of the daily fires and tasks.

So, without further ado, here is my list of career objectives for 2016:

1. Build an effective monitoring process for our storage and virtualization platforms.  Over the past few years the company I have worked for has grown substantially, both organically and through acquisition.  This makes for a very dynamic storage infrastructure, requiring me to be able to report quickly and efficiently on where we're at today, where we've been based on landmark events, and what is a reasonable projection.  
2. Expand knowledge and understanding of public cloud services and how they may integrate to serve our company's infrastructure.  While I haven't fully bought into migrating our data center into "the cloud," I'm afraid the writing is on the wall as far as the use of public/private cloud infrastructure goes.    There are several players involved, and my company is partnered with several.  To ignore this technology would be to ignore the future, and I've got a lot of "future" left in my career.  It will be better to know and understand well enough to make informed decisions where this technology is a good fit and if not, be able to answer with authority to state as such.
3. Expand my understanding of OpenStack, SDN and related projects for data center orchestration.  Determine if there is a good fit in the mid-size enterprise for this technology.
4. Expand my knowledge and use of Python as a means of automating processes in the data center.  This dove-tails into the above objective, as well.
5. Renew my CCNA Route/Switch via CCNA Data Center.  My life seems to be going down the path of Data Center Engineering more than routing and switching.  I'll go this direction and use the CCNA/DC to renew my CCNA/RS.

I have several other objectives, but these are the over-arching goals.  I've decided not to include project-based goals I've already defined, such as upgrade our EMC VNX storage or add compute.  These are much more tactical objectives and I view them as daily work, not so much as objectives to increase my knowledge and expand my understanding.

I'll be posting my study notes again as I start down the CCNA Data Center learning track, and am also planning a trip to EMC World 2016 this year.  It's going to be fun and exciting...