All Posts Tagged With: "IT Operations"
One 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 [...]
Continue ReadingThis is an essential piece of equipment in a data center. A device designed to lift and hold servers and other rack mounted equipment ready to install into their home rack.
Without one of these (or something similar), it is just a matter of time before you drop a server and injure yourself or a colleague. [...]
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 ReadingI 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 [...]
This picture is from a BT Data Center in Holland, just outside Amsterdam.
There are quite significant airflow benefits to keeping power and data cables overhead and out of the plenum space under the floor. Underfloor pressures can be maximized and airflow design can be maintained.
If we can avoid lifting floor tiles when installing network and [...]
I 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 Reading
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 ReadingSimultaneously the most powerful aspect of and the biggest problem with IT Systems are that they are flexible by design. They are so flexible that that many of our people want to show how smart they are by being helpful and adding value. Unfortunately, being helpful is one of these things that inevitably leads to unintended [...]
Continue ReadingFloor loading is a badly understood issue in Data Centers. Not just in the place where the equipment eventually ends up but also en-route from the loading bay to the final resting place.
OK, so lets start looking at the problem. Most data centers have a raised floor made of specialist tiles held up on struts and a [...]
Continue ReadingWe all worry about failures in our data centers, some types of failure more than others. Losing a server is bad, losing a storage array extremely bad! How then might we categorize a full power failure in a data centre? Catastrophic certainly, even careless perhaps?
I can hear the questions already:
How could I have a full [...]
Loading ...
