About

I'm Mohammad Siddiqui, known to most people in the industry as Sarge. I'm a senior solution architect specialising in enterprise cloud infrastructure, based in Sydney, with 35 years across financial services, vendor, consulting and customer environments.

Most recently I've been technical owner for multi-region VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 programmes across Australia, Asia, the UK, Europe and North America, including large brownfield conversions from standalone vSphere to VCF-managed infrastructure. That work spans private, hybrid and public cloud, vSAN ESA, VKS, security and disaster recovery, and building multi-fleet resilience frameworks mapped to APRA CPS 234 and CPS 230, PRA SS1/21 and NYDFS.

My work sits where architecture meets the commercial decision. Running technical discovery, building the business case, designing the target state, and staying involved long enough to find out whether it held up.

That daily exposure is what this publication draws on. I see how a broad range of customers actually consume this technology: the patterns that work, the integrations that turn out harder than the datasheet suggests, and the design decisions that look fine until year two.

How I got here

Thirty-five years in enterprise IT, and it started in a tape library. My first job was as a tape library and backup operator at the Commonwealth Bank, swapping cartridges and running overnight jobs. You learn things there that stay with you: that backups are only as good as the restore nobody has tested, and that the person who gets called at 3am has a different view of a design from the person who drew it.

From there I came up through storage and SAN, Windows desktop, server and database platforms, Active Directory, messaging, networking, JD Edwards and mainframe-backed systems, across HP, IBM, Cisco UCS and Dell.

At News Corp I was compute and VMware lead on a data centre transformation across a three-thousand-server estate. Before that I supported the media production systems behind the newsrooms, including on the sideline at NRL and cricket fixtures, working with photographers and journalists to get images and copy filed faster. Deadline pressure on a sideline teaches you something about latency that a datasheet doesn't.

I've sat on every side of the table: vendor at Compaq, HP, Dell and Lexmark, consulting at KPMG, and customer side at News Corp and the Commonwealth Bank.

I spent nearly a decade at VMware, most of it as a Technical Account Manager embedded with Australian banks: CBA, RBA, Westpac and Bankwest, in relationships measured in years rather than projects. Six years with RBA, six and a half with CBA. Long enough to watch a design decision play out to its conclusion, which is a different education from making the call and moving on.

So when I write about what enterprises get wrong, it isn't from the outside.

I'm a VMware vExpert, part of the Sydney VMUG chapter committee and the APJ vCommunity leadership for ANZ. TOGAF certified. ANZ Technical Account Manager of the Year, 2017.

What you'll find here

Detailed technical write-ups on cloud infrastructure architecture and operations: design decisions and the trade-offs behind them, upgrade and patching strategy, identity and certificate integration, disaster recovery design, and third-party integrations in enterprise environments.

Not product news, not marketing. If something has a sharp edge, I'd rather say so.

Not everything here is technical. I also write about organisations that get things wrong, decisions that turned out to matter, and reflections on faith and practice under Deen. Same approach, different subject.

Corrections welcome

The fastest way to find a weak assumption is to have someone running the same thing in production tell you it doesn't hold. If I've got something wrong, or there's a design problem you'd like covered, reply to any post. I read everything.

New posts arrive by email as they publish. Some ask for a free signup; there's no paid tier.

Views expressed here are my own.