DatacenterDude

Nick Howell

Nick Howell reads DatacenterDude.com aloud. Audio versions of the essays, blogs, and newsletter issues. AI infrastructure, data-center reality, and notes from 30 years in the fight.

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17 episodes
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English

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June 22 · 20 min
It’s 2AM… Do You Know What Your Agents are Doing?
AI agents make decisions in your infrastructure. Here's what to observe, why it matters, and where the tooling stands today for infrastructure teams.
May 21 · 12 min
Free Money Got You Fired | DCD Dispatch #03
The AI transformation eliminating jobs across tech didn't start with AI. It started with a government check nobody had to pay back, and a narrative that made the cleanup easier to sell than the truth.
May 13 · 16 min
Productivity Dependency Outpacing Governance
We've watched this pattern play out across four generations of enterprise IT. AI tooling is next, and this time there's nothing to repatriate.
May 11 · 15 min
Mainframes! We Are SO Back, Baby!
Fifty years ago, enterprise computing lived on one box. Then the PC arrived, and we spent the next five decades distributing everything that wasn't nailed down. Client/server. Virtualization. Containers. Cloud. The mainframe became a punchline. Turns out it was just patient.
May 7 · 12 min
Europe Just Hit Cancel | DCD Dispatch #02
Europe is in the middle of a coordinated rebuild of the software stack out from under American hyperscaler dependency. The licensing extortion got the procurement teams' attention. The open source apps and the sovereign cloud are finally ready.
May 6 · 13 min
Your Slack Workspace Trained Your Replacement
Defunct startups are selling Slack archives, Jira tickets, and email threads to AI labs for six figures. The privacy outrage and gold rush takes are missing the actual story: this is a data lifecycle failure infrastructure veterans solved 30 years ago, in a tier the SaaS vendors quietly excused themselves from governing.
May 4 · 9 min
That’s No Moon… it’s a LEO Datacenter
"Look at the size of that thing." Eight orgs racing to orbit. A million satellite filings in a single week. The pitch only works if three things all go right.
April 27 · 19 min
Cloudflare Unweight is actually a Storage Problem
Cloudflare's new lossless LLM compression tool isn't really an AI story. It's a storage architecture story applied to GPU memory.
April 23 · 13 min
The Day I Stopped Pretending I Knew Everything | DCD Dispatch #01
A year ago I hit a moment every infrastructure veteran eventually hits. I didn't know what I was looking at. Here's what I did about it, and why your 20 years of experience matter more than ever if you start now.
April 20 · 11 min
AI is Giving Object Storage Its Moment
AI agents don't come to your data estate on a schedule. They come when they have a question. Most object storage platforms were never designed for that access pattern. Here's what that gap means for your infrastructure, and why NetApp StorageGRID was quietly built for exactly this moment.
April 16 · 19 min
Your Website Doesn't Speak AI Yet
There's a new interface layer being standardized across the web right now. It's written in plain text. It's been quietly adopted by Anthropic, Stripe, Cloudflare, and hundreds of others. And your enterprise almost certainly doesn't have one.
April 15 · 13 min
Private Compute, Public Burden
$64 billion in blocked projects. A statewide moratorium in Maine. Eleven states considering similar action. The industry keeps calling this a NIMBY problem. It isn't.
April 13 · 31 min
What Even is Vibe Coding?
Everyone's either mocking the phrase or evangelizing it. Both camps are missing the point. "Vibe coding" is a dumb name for something that's actually reshaping who gets to build software, and what your 20 years of infrastructure experience is suddenly worth in that world. I have opinions. Lots of them.
April 10 · 8 min
Before We Begin | DCD Dispatch #00
The introductory issue of the DCD Dispatch newsletter. An introduction to me, where I've been, and what you can expect from subscribing.
April 10 · 10 min
Modernization without the Meltdown
For the last two years, enterprise IT shops running hypervisor environments have been staring at a short menu of bad options. The NetApp and Nutanix alliance just added a fourth one.
April 9 · 10 min
It's a F**king Mainframe
AI isn’t primarily a UX story. It’s an infrastructure control story wearing a conversational mask, and a lot of old-school operators are more relevant to this era than they think.
April 6 · 11 min
I Was Busy Arguing with Reality
After years buried in cloud, alliances, and AI infrastructure, I’m bringing DatacenterDude back online. Saltier, sharper, and with a lot more to say.

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