IT Operations
The Daily Mail reports that a UK Government investigation was launched after the personally identifiable information (PII) of more than a million bank customers was found on a computer sold on eBay.
Highly sensitive information on American Express, NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland customers was found on the disk array sold for £35.88 (about $72).
The [...]
Continue ReadingAn Engineer working on a Fiber Optic Patch Panel.
Continue ReadingToday we are going to look at practical changes that we can all make to our data centres that will improve cooling efficiency, to enable us to install more equipment in the same space or reduce our electricity bills.
There are a few basic rules that will help us become more efficient.
The first is the less [...]
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The photograph shows what happens when cable management is left to chance. The weight of the cables will put strain on the connections resulting in unexpected failures. Almost certainly the mess will grow and the jumble of cables will spill out of the rack door causing a trip hazard.
Yeugh!
This picture comes from Craig Black and shows the most artistic cable management setup I have ever seen. Incredibly tidy and neat.
Craig comments that
“The horizontal stuff is Leviton and the vertical is Panduit. It all came together really well — we wanted to make it look neat and it ended up that way.”
I just picked up a really neat article from Eric Siebert - When Not to Treat VMs like Physical Servers. The basis of the article is common sense really (but common sense is often left at home by us in IT), mostly we can treat Virtual Machines just like Physical Machines but there are a [...]
Continue ReadingWe asked The Hot Aisle readers to tell us what they were doing with Storage Virtualization. Interestingly only just over one third of our readers have no plans for Storage Virtualization.
An interesting market opportunity?
I have been thinking about why virtualization is now mature in lots of IT Infrastructure technologies…
Servers (VMWare, Parallels, Mainframe VM, Solaris Domains, AIX LPARS etc..)
Networks (Virtual Private Networks VPNs are endemic)
Firewalls
Desktops (VDI)
…but it just hasn’t got to mainstream in enterprise storage.
I think that I have worked it out. Enterprise storage is (almost) the last vestige of proprietary [...]
We buy too much software from software vendors because we don’t have processes and tools in place to ensure we only buy what we need.
What we need is what we use not what we install.
A fair software licensing agreement would allow us to pay for software that our employees need to do their jobs. Software companies have defined this [...]
It’s not a new phenomenon, Sun did it over a decade ago with the 4500 range of servers that vent hot air left to right rather than front to back but it doesn’t make it any easier to run a complex site when major vendors like Cisco continue to insist on breaking the front to back [...]
Continue ReadingI picked up an interesting news article about field force automation. Believe me that even a small amount of effort to automate and optimize Field Engineers pays off handsomely. At BT we did some home grown stuff and even that made a great difference to calls per Engineer, and fuel, distance per call metrics. I wish [...]
Continue ReadingI first heard this phrase from my good friend and sometime mentor, Danny McNulty, when we worked together at Cable & Wireless. You may have heard of the book What They Don’t Teach You At Harvard Business School by Mark H McCormack, well, just like McCormack, Danny is full of tried and tested management techniques and [...]
Continue ReadingThe way that most organizations run and manage their IT Operations is unscientific and somewhat random. This leads to overstaffing, poor performance, uncertain customer experience and unpredictability of delivery. It is worth comparing the way that IT Operations is organized with the older, more scientific and mature manufacturing industry.
The Industrial Revolution started in England in earnest around 1780 or so with machine based [...]
You may be very surprised to see that McKinsey believe that Data Center costs are 25% of all IT costs. Many CIOs will find it difficult to reconcile this view with their own budgets. There are a two key reasons why this is a difficult and badly understood process.
Within many organizations many of the data center [...]
Continue ReadingHere is the acid test - our customers often know that there is a service problem before we do. When that happens, as far as our customers are concerned, we suck, we are incompetent and they are smarter than us. Our IT Operations team may be publishing loads of great Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that show improvements [...]
Continue ReadingThe consequences of data center failure can be pretty catastrophic for your business, so unsurprisingly, you will have very high expectations about availability and reliability. Unfortunately for many of us, our expectations will not be met by reality. Very often the system that is our data center facility is significantly less reliable than we might [...]
Continue ReadingDuring my time at BT I set the Data Centre team the challenge of getting Asset Management right, the team thought I was just being stupid and unreasonable but buckled down and with a bit of hard work got it close to 100% right with processes to keep it right. As a direct result of [...]
Continue ReadingOne of the strangest things about IT people is that they often miss the obvious until it is explained to them (sometimes with the aid of a hammer). We are all so used to following the rules and doing what everyone else does. This particularly applies to IT Operations, also known as the Command Centre [...]
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