Urban Haas

@urbananimal

Urban is an executive experienced in managing all aspects of a business. His 33 years of industry experience has taken him through a diverse set of areas: software development, integration, consulting, sales, architecture and CEO. Urban helped CDW bring new offerings to market and is known for pushing the envelope. Today, Urban is an executive technology strategist covering all things in the data center and cloud-based services, crossing private infrastructure and multiple public cloud service providers. He participates on many cross-functional teams to increase value and bring new innovative offerings to our customers. Urban can be found speaking at CDW-hosted events and vendor conferences. An outside-the-box thinker, Urban creates unique technology solutions to solve difficult business problems, taking advantage of data center convergence to reduce costs while taking resiliency and availability to the next level. He has a passion for engineering simple, right-sized solutions that keep capital expenses in line. Urban lives on a hobby farm outside of Minneapolis. He sings, plays guitar, rides horses, blogs, is involved with non-profit causes and travels around the globe.

Executive Technology Strategist

5 Touchstones on the Path to IT Modernization

Organizations must position themselves to adapt to a rapidly changing IT landscape.

By Urban Haas

January 29, 2020

Data Center, Cloud, Software

[sayit] Most IT professionals who are more than a few years into their career remember walking into a data center and seeing 100 or 200 “pizza boxes” — rack after rack full of physical servers, each running a separate application. Today, of course, it’s normal for enterprise data centers to run 2,000, 10,000 or as…

With automation and multicloud technologies impacting the data center, management services become more important.

By Urban Haas

October 16, 2019

Data Center

Data centers have changed quite a bit since pizza boxes reigned supreme. We replaced those servers with virtualization, reducing our physical footprint and utilizing more of the CPUs and memory. Next came the idea of fully tested systems in the form of converged infrastructure: making sure different components of compute, storage and networking worked well…

Taking the wraps off of Cisco MDS 16 Gb FC Directors and Switches

By Urban Haas

May 6, 2013

Data Center

We’ve come a long way since the original Cisco MDS line debuted a decade ago. Cisco maintained strong upward and backward compatibility allowing upgrades to a director, replacing line cards and supervisors, taking us from 2 to 4 then 8 Gb FibreChannel (FC) – while preserving the chassis, backplane and power supplies. There have been…