Somewhere between the office and the hotel last Wednesday my laptop decided to take a dirt nap. I’ve spent most of the weekend recovering. I have a few miscellaneous applications to get installed and working properly, but I’m 90% recovered at this point. The biggest item we rebuilding my Outlook cache, which took six hours this afternoon. Now that I am properly back online I am sufficiently behind at work and in my writing -- not like I was ahead before this happened.

posted: 10:11:47 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

Communicating with other IT professionals and business representatives isn’t hard, just a little uncomfortable. It’s good for all of us to get outside of our comfort zone now and then. The more we do this, the more we grow. When it comes to discussing storage with others, here are a few helpful guidelines. When talking to a business person about storage, always talk in terms of cost. How much does it cost to run your complete storage environment? How much does it cost per month for a specific application to consume its storage? All storage professionals are good with numbers; get close to the storage cost numbers. Do the work. When talking with other IT professionals about storage, always talk in terms of functionality that would make their jobs easier. Why are the DBAs doing log shipping when they could replicate at the block level with greater reliability and versatility using software you have already purchased? Why are backups being done over the Ethernet network that could be done directly through the FC network, reducing operational impact on applications and backup times? Illustrate for other IT professionals how the entire infrastructure can be optimized by using storage and storage software features at no additional cost. As a storage admin or architect, you have to be your own evangelist. Schedule time with other IT professionals to discuss how they are using storage. Insert yourself earlier in the planning process. Show your executives that you are exercising their sizable investment in storage infrastructure. You would be amazed at how far a little good communication can go.

posted: 10:07:04 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

George Spalding was our ITIL instructor this week. I highly recommend him as a trainer and presenter. He was highly engaging on some very dry material. George did go on a tirade about storage. According to George, storage is about the geekiest area of IT to possibly be in and the toughest thing to communicate since it is all about bits and bytes. I disagree. Storage isn’t about bit and bytes. It’s about data. Storage is where your data lives, to paraphrase and not to promote EMC. Storage vendors have done a very good job illustrating the role of storage and how it can be incorporated into IT processes such as ITIL. The fact that an instructor like George Spalding is still characterizing storage as an almost impossible area in IT astutely illustrates the job before us storage architects. We must learn to communicate in terms that other IT professionals and business representatives can understand. It’s not hard, just a little uncomfortable.

posted: 10:06:31 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

My team won the airport operations simulation. Interestingly, we won because we took a low tech approach to running the airport. The other team completely automated their processes and was using spreadsheets to solve their problems. With each round they were closing the gap, but not fast enough. We had not changed our process much since the second round but focused on improving communication instead. We swarmed the problem and collapsed the organization rather than sticking to the organization that was originally presented to us. At the end of the game, the other team had spent much more time trying to automate their processes with technology and both teams were averaging about 45 seconds to solve a problem using two different approaches; one high tech and one low tech. In the end, the low tech approach won.

posted: 10:00:39 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

I have been in Chicago all week getting ready to start on an RFP for outsourcing more data center functionality. We’ve hired a consulting organization that specializes in IT outsourcing RFP development to assist us. I discovered today that there is no section in their RFP template for storage. I am in charge of the storage group for this endeavor. We got in a heated debate whether a separate section for storage is required. Of course I argued that there should be. My argument was that 40% to 60% of a server cost is storage, which is why storage is continually being centralized, stratified, and virtualized. The argument against a having a separate section for storage was that servers and applications are the consumers of storage therefore storage is a component of a server. Huh? Where have these guys been for the past five years? We didn’t have time to complete the discussion. If this is the way outsourcers look at storage they are about five years behind the technology curve, which will be reflected in their costs. We will be finishing the discussion on Monday.

posted: 10:00:16 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()