"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."

In the 1960s, Abraham Maslow, a psychologist, wrote of the perils of reductionism; the temptation to view the world through a narrow lens.
Now it is certainly true that in almost all cases, applying reductionism to a problem— turning everything to a nail in Maslow's analogy— is a negative strategy. It steamrollers over the subtleties of whatever it's being applied to.
But there is one scenario where reductionism is actually an excellent strategy. That's when you have a large, heterogeneous network of computers to manage. A network comprising an ever-expanding collection of device types, operating systems, and software applications.
In this environment, any management or troubleshooting tasks are complicated by the variety of endpoints you have to deal with. Perhaps a critical utility isn't available on a device, or it behaves differently in an older version of the OS. Or you want to do something across your estate, such as managing disk usage proactively, but the processes involved in doing this differ significantly from, say, Windows to Linux.
Much of what we do in managing modern complex systems and their interactions resembles Harry Potter's book of spells. As our systems become more heterogeneous and complex, the book of spells gets fatter and fatter. As IT operations wizards, we're expected to wave our magic wands ever faster, as we ward off the dark demons of cyber attackers, battle with ever more demanding and fickle customers, and cope with constant change on every front.
We definitely need magic, but a different kind of magic. Magic that flattens out the complexity of the disparate systems we manage so that, instead of trying to remember whether it was 'Expelliarmus!' or perhaps 'Reparo!' that we should be shouting at a machine, we simply say what we want to do in plain English. Then collect the results of our command, follow it up, refine it and – by magic – work more effectively and calmly than we ever managed previously.

Now, that magic really exists. It's called Tachyon, and it understands what you want to do, using plain English. It hides the complexity of the differing systems you manage so that you can just ask for all the files on the disk ending with xyz, and not trouble you with the exact command. It lets you drill down and refine any question. Or invoke a follow-up action to remediate an issue and deploy it seamlessly to a collection of devices. Tachyon does this in real time, at scale.
With Tachyon, we really are reducing all our problems to nails, so that we can deal with them in a unified, consistent way. The hammer that is Tachyon is no ordinary hammer; it's Thor's hammer, a god's hammer, a weapon of extraordinary power.
I'll be talking about real-life scenarios with Tachyon in a future set of blog posts. For now, though, you might want to put that wand down and enjoy a nice cup of tea. Because there is a better way. Watch the latest Tachyon Movie now to find out more about this impressive, multifaceted tool.