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I am always amazed that the IT people operate in a very disciplined, task-oriented manner but fail to understand how people think and work, let alone working in harmony with the users or customers most of the time. Even the fact that the IT people themselves are already users do not help make their relationships any better: they want prime support from the call center or the support personnel from whom they are receiving services -say their mobile carrier- but they fail to provide the same to their non-IT colleagues. Of course not everyone is the same, but the majority of the IT people share similar behaviors. I will hit my colleagues hard throughout this article. No offense please.
The first one I will talk about is the root of all things in the universe: us vs. you. What IT people fail to realize is there is no you or no us. As long as the people share the same set of goals, they are one. If the business is about selling socks, the sales people try to sell more socks, the marketing people try to convince customers that their socks are better, the accounting people keep the record of the socks sold, the warehouse people keep the inventory of the socks and the IT people provide the behind-the-scenes environment (servers, networks, connections, whatever you name it) for all the people to be the best socks company. No department or division is more important or more knowledgeable than the other, and so is the IT.
Most of the time the IT people fail to understand that they are part of the overall business: there is no such thing as IT and non-IT.
Realizing that there is no difference between the departments, IT staff has to understand that requiring people to have the same level of IT knowledge as they do is downward nonsense (ah, by the way, IT staff also has a tendency to label the enthusiastic, a little bit knowledgeable users). Personally I believe that company policies should be in place for people’s level of knowledge to use the IT equipment and the applications (such as working with Outlook to send, receive, forward e-mail, contact and distribution group management, calendar, tasks, working with Excel etc.) and the policies for the IT department to provide the necessary training together with or immediately after the employee orientation. However, I do not believe that people should be required to know more about IT things other than they use for their daily business. For an administrative secretary who works with Outlook everyday can know the ins and outs, and it is reasonable to expect some higher knowledge with Outlook but you cannot expect her to provide you with the IP address configuration details or to check the processor and memory use of the processes in her slow computer and let you know about the diagnostics data. What IT people tend to do is to say “the users even don’t know how to open up a command and run ipconfig” in a somehow overlooking voice tone. This is the same thing if an accountant says “the IT people even don’t know how to calculate the accrued taxes.”
Typically in an enterprise a department feeds the other departments (internal and external) with their working statuses and other relevant information, such as the warehouse operators informing sales that the packaging and shipments would take some hours later, to let them inform the customers or to inform the transportation company about the delays to let them reschedule the trucks to arrive later in the warehouse. IT is no different. IT has to inform the users (or the customers) beforehand of any maintenance beforehand with the relevant details. If the downtime is not related to the maintenance but an unexpected incident, then the IT has to take the initiative to announce people that they know about the situation and they are working on it for the resolution.
Plus, the given rights to restart a server do not let the administrators exercise it whenever they feel so. Administrators cannot go for a -say- file server restart in the middle of the day if they can postpone it to after office hours or do it after an announcement. If the latest backup is yesterday night’s, it is 2 o’clock in the afternoon, the user is working on a document that she did not save and if the administrator just restart the server without any information, he can corrupt the user’s data or make her lose it, which is a misuse of his rights and an intolerable action.
The way that IT changes its perspective from the us vs. you, it approaches the other departments as an “enabler”, “assister” rather than the “preventer” or “overlooker.” This small step will radically change the perception of IT and will bring everyone in and out of the comany together. In a fast changing business environment, especially with the cloud transformation, this perception will help the IT staff a lot in the future.
Bringing everything I discussed in this series together: careful planning, careful operations and careful behaviors, the IT and the business will have more returns from its data center investment. And it will take a very short time to feel the effects of these returns everywhere in the business.
References
I have spoken about the most common mistakes in the planning phase in my previous article. Although there are companies that have correctly passed through the planning phase, they make the most common mistakes in the operations phase. It is also very interesting to see that the companies, whose main area of business is Information Technologies (hosts, IT consultants, IT support companies and even telecommunications companies) make the same mistakes in their operations.
The mistakes in operations start with failing to recognize that the IT staff consists of human beings and they have a clear need for training. I do not say that just because I am a Microsoft Certified Trainer but because I see a clear change in people’s way of thinking after training: a data center operator needs to think way different from the computer repair shop operator in your community. If you operate your data center with the same mentality that you operate a computer repair shop, then you will be in big trouble – maybe not today but surely in the future.
Cloud integration can prove to be very beneficial. Just don’t forget to include it in your operations planning.
Once training is in place, the correct ways to operate the data center is voiced by the IT staff, starting with the correct operations of the servers. Just because a server is in your data center, fed with stable electricity and cooled properly does not mean that everything is set to work as it should be. In fact, you have just provided the necessities for the hardware to operate correctly. Now you have to listen to your IT staff and take care about the operating system and the applications, which need to be updated, upgraded, patched and backed up at the very least. All are part of daily operations, which need to be tightly controlled and carefully carried out.
Then comes the virtualization. I am sure this still needs to be emphasized. If you have not already virtualized your data center and still keeping servers assigned to tasks, then you are throwing your money out of the window. And I mean, seriously it is way better to throw your money out of the window than to operate a non-virtualized data center: you are not only wasting money in capital investments by purchasing more equipment, you are also spending more money on electricity, plus accruing losses due to data center productivity, operational inefficiencies and underutilized equipment. And when you are virtualized, not only you leave these problems behind, but also have a far more reliable IT infrastructure.
Next comes the power from the cloud. As it should be, there are the proponents and opponents of the cloud (and although I am a private cloud engineer), the small and medium businesses have a lot to benefit from the cloud. Although I cannot say that the cloud is a 100% solution for all the IT problems in existence, I can safely say that the cloud offers a lot of flexibility in terms of data center operations. With a careful of your analysis of your data center and your pain points – both in terms of operations and the required capital investments, you can offload some of your tasks to the cloud. You may consider moving your e-mail to a hosted Exchange platform (or Office 365 or Google Apps) if a big investment is under way for Exchange 2013 or Windows Azure or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud if you need to invest in databases. If you already have an established data center with daily operations, you can consider the cloud for your disaster scenarios. Even if you do not have such plans in the near future, just keep a continuous thinking about the cloud and the possibilities of integrating your data center with it.
With proper planning and proper operations, you will have a very good functioning data center that has the ability to sustain your current and future business. Now everything is in place internally, you have to make sure that everything is in place externally, meaning your customers or your users.
When I visit my clients’ data centers, I often see the same mistakes repeated over and over. When I find the time to speak with the IT managers – or the owners- I find out that those mistakes stem from three different facts:
The planning phase starts with the projected growth of your business, which will drive the IT, which in turn will require more resources to meet the needs of the business. Many businesses start with the “enough for today” decision, just to see it turn against themselves when the business begins to take off. Always think about 5 to 10 years later and always assume that you will be growing with the projected rates, not with the current rates.
The first thing that you need to consider in terms of your data center is the floor space. If you do not plan for the floor space, it will prove much costly to expand it when the time comes. Of course this takes the power supply and cooling into consideration. When you are designing your data center, you need to account for a generator and an uninterruptable power supply (UPS) at the very minimum. The generator and the UPS also has to have the capacity to feed the cooling equipment in addition to the servers and the network infrastructure. Although one generator and one power supply looks enough, there may be cases when you need to purchase a second generator for failover purpose and a more capable UPS – if you are planning for a hotel’s data center for example.
Of course, “enough for today” also applies to the server and network capacity. You can work with one or two servers for today – which is enough – but when you need to deploy additional servers, there will be a deployment time. This deployment time is the sum of the purchasing decision, purchasing process, delivery time, data center implementation, installation, configuration and deployment times. If you are purchasing servers from well-known vendors, the whole deployment time can take about, or more than, 8 weeks (no, this is not an exaggeration, vendors state delivery times as 4 – 6 weeks). That means, when your business begins to take off, you will not be able to provide it with the necessary power for about 2 months. The customers and the business lost due to the lack of the IT resources will be much more costly than the initial incremental investment that you would have made to purchase a more powerful server.
No this is not a joke. It is hard to believe if you did not witness such a datacenter.
You also need to reflect the same planning in your data center. Given that you have enough floor space (you just planned for that), place the racks so that you can service the equipment both from the front and the rear. Make sure that a tall person can service the bottom-most equipment with ease while holding his laptop connected to its management port. Also make sure that all the cables and patch panels are correctly labeled and smartly connected (just as a side note, from an IT manager’s perspective, I honestly believe that the correctly labeled and a tidy datacenter should be one of the performance criteria of the IT staff).
In the planning phase, do not forget to plan for security and remote access. Often, the business owners fail to accept the back-stab fact, which is the internal threat from the organization. Once this happens, the shock and the remedies take quite some time. To take a preventive measure, at least, you have to plan for the physical security – these times you can purchase a biometric access control device and software for about USD 300 retail price. You can collect the access logs on a server or on a controlled computer which has additional or different security measures.
Security also applies for the remote access. Although you need to provide yourself remote access to your data center, both on and off premise, the access should be secured as well. Even if you go for hosted solutions, make sure that you have access to your servers with methods other than those provided by the host; don’t go for just a control-panel-type gateway.
Once you have planned for your data center, you have to make sure that it is operated properly. The lack of proper operations either boosts your investment or trashes it, which I discuss in full detail in the next article in the series.
References
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