Pre-data center move tips

We are getting ready to move our data enter yet again. This will be the fourth time we move this particular one so we are getting pretty good at it. It's funny how much goes into one of these that people just don't realize.

A few examples...

1. Every connection needs to be documented. If not you will not know where to plug it in once you arrive at the new data center.

2. Every server location must be documented both where it is currently and where it is going. By location I mean the cabinet and "U location". A typical cabinet has 42 U locations, some servers take 1U some can take 20U. There is a big difference...

3. Then you need to have a server move document that shows where the server came from and goes to, so that it goes on the right pallet. The right pallet is the one that matches the "go to" cabinet. It makes it quicker putting them back in.

4. All the cables at the new location need to be labelled and ideally color coded. It's much easier to find the one cable out of 300 that you need, if only ten of them are red...

5. Print out the labels ahead of time but don't put them on the cables. Otherwise you will spend too much time trying to find the next cable...

6. Unbag and untie all of the cables ahead of time too. It may not sound like much but when you have 1000 cables, even that 30 seconds per cable adds up. In this case to around 6 hours of time...

7. You can't have more than three people working in a cabinet, one in the front and one in the back, maybe one handing the cables. You also need to leave a space in the cabinets you are working on or people will just be in the way....

8. Have a separate test team and troubleshoot team, if possible. After working until Midnight on Friday taking stuff out, and then working 16 hours on Saturday putting them back in, you will be too tired to actually be that effective...

9. Have a priority list, just in cast you don't get to finish everything on time you can at least make sure the most important systems are available as quickly as you can.

10. After you are done, celebrate then figure out what you could have done better. Number 5 is a great example of learning from something that didn't quite go as good as we expected. Everyone likes to think they will only do this once, but never say never.

I'm sure once we are done I'll have some post move tips too, so stay tuned.

Some timing numbers we use...
Setting up a new cabinet (moving it in place, securing it etc) takes 30 minutes.
Racking (or unracking) a server takes 10 minutes
Plugging in one network cable is 5 minutes
Power cables are 2 minutes.

The right tool for the job - netflow

It's been a few weeks since I last posted. With the holidays, moving our corporate headquarters (and 500 people) it's been busy. Plus I didn't have anything insightful to add and I don't want to be one of those folks that feels the need to blog just to blog.

Then as Ray Barone, on "Everybody Loves Raymond" said, "sometimes material presents itself" This past week material presented itself...

In Maine having a "plow truck" is pretty much a requirement. For those not from the area a plow truck is usually an old truck, mostly rusted out that isn't safe to drive on the road with a plow on the front, brakes are optional My plow truck's power steering stopped working along with the heater so I spent a few days working on it.

I hate working on vehicles because, well, I have no idea what I'm doing.... But with the help of the internet I searched around and found out my power steering was leaking at a fitting going to the power steering gear box. It looked like an easy fix to change it so I disconnected the hose and broke the fitting in the process.

Unfortunately I couldn;t get the now broken fitting out. It was too rusted and the wrenches and sockets I had just kept trying to strip the head off and ruin the fitting. I spent all of day 1 trying to heat the fitting, and spraying it with "Liquid Wrench" to try and get it out. Finally when it got too dark and cold to work I went back online and searched for "rusted fitting removal"

Sure enough there were a lot of people with the same problem and it turns out something called an impact wrench seems to be the tool of choice. It turns out I have an impact wrench and after 30 minutes of dragging out the hoses, compressors and fittings I used that to remove the fitting in about 45 seconds. It took about 2 more minutes to put the new fitting in, connect the hose and that problem was fixed.

Having the right tool, and knowing it is the right tool is key. Clearly I had the right tool but didn't know it because I had never used it. I could tell because it was still in the plastic.

Many IT administrators have plenty of tools that they have forgotten about. One of the most powerful ones is netflow. Netflow lets you see every conversation on the network, but is very rarely used. It takes a high end switch to be able to do "full netflow" without impacting performance. I think Enterasys switches are one of the few, if not the only ones, that can do this.If you have it though it becomes one of the tools you use very frequently.

If you aren't familiar with it, check out some of the posts and uses for it here.

People helping people

One of my beliefs is that people like helping people. I know it's hard to believe that some times when you watch the news, or some one cuts you off on the highway but I still feel that way.

Sure the driver that cut you off may have not been helping you, but he or she could have been bringing a kidney to the hospital and needs to get there quickly, or maybe they are a volunteer rescue worker and forgot to put on their light. I don't know, but I still think just because they aren't helping you at that time, doesn't mean they aren't helping someone.

Why is this even remotely important? Well one of the main reasons social network and collaboration works is because people like helping people. Many times simply posting a question will yield dozens of results from knowledgeable people willing to share their advice.

Smart companies are already leveraging this by creating community groups. Many times this can help reduce support calls (and money spent answering those calls). Even more importantly it helps build more engaged and loyal customers.

Tools like Salesforce.com's Chatter, Yammer, Sharepoint and a host of other free tools are available to help build these community frameworks. People are willing to help. It will take time to build a vibrant community but in the future this will be "table stakes" as customers become more used to working with social businesses. Those businesses that aren't social will decline as the innovators grow.

Asus Zenbook and Galaxy SIII

I recently upgraded my HTC evo 3d from Sprint to a GS3 from Verizon. The same week I upgraded my Dell E4300 to an Asus Zenbook Prime. After a few weeks here's my thoughts on them...

Samsung Galaxy S3

The GS3 is fast and Verizon coverage rocks. I get 4g coverage in Maine which I never would have expected I would see in 2013 let alone now. When it connects to 4G it is super fast. Even 3g speeds seem like much better coverage than Sprint. The display is awesome.

It stinks having to switch phones. I sort of assumed that since I used google play at least the apps I had downloaded would have magically showed up. They didn't and I spent the first day getting them all again and organizing the icons so I could find them. It was what I was used to but I was expecting better.

The display is great, but breaks super easy. I know it is supposed to be Gorilla Glass, but I think mine was Bunny Glass or something. Literally it slipped out of my hands and fell and cracked the glass. Entirely my fault but a 12-18" drop seems like it should not have ruined a $600 phone.

The even worse news is the repair is a $250 repair. I have insurance but it still is going to be $100 out of pocket. So far I've lived with it. I figure if I broke it in 2 weeks with normal use, I can't afford to repair it every time it breaks. I mean that's $50 a week.. It sure seems like a glass replacement is more like a $20 repair. If anyone knows any tricks I'd  love to hear them.

Lately my phone has been rebooting. Hopefully this won't be a regular occurrence

Asus Zenbook Prime

The zenbook is super fast. It's light and the display again is really good.

Unfortunately the display is too good. The resolution is so good that I can't see it. I really need to drop it down to something that makes every thing bigger, or admit I need progressive lenses. I'll probably do the resolution thing....

I hate the touch pad. It seems way to sensitive when I'm typing and frequently I look at the screen and find the cursor moved on me and I'm garbling paragraphs. So far it has happened twice in this post. That really pisses me off, but worse when I am trying to use the touch pad it doesn't seem sensitive enough. To be fair, I've never liked them and disabled it on my Dell too and used the pointing stick. The Zenbook doesn't have that so I need to use an external mouse which stinks when I'm in a lazyboy recliner....

I hate the face that I need to hit a function key to get page up or down to work as well as the volume. Speaking of volume the sound is much better than the Dell speakers were.

It's a super light laptop but the downfall is I need a dongle for the external VGA monitor and it doesn't have a DVD or ethernet port either. They shipped the machine with a USB ethernet port, but it was a 10/100Mbs connection. I always use wireless so not a big deal, but really 10/100????

I know I'm going to lose or forget the vga dongle. I haven't yet, but I will.

I miss the 3 power supplies I had with my Dell. I only have one with the Asus. I'll forget that one day and need to get another one. Not exactly an Asus issue, just annoys me. :)

Generally I love them both, but like anything it takes some getting used to. I'm still getting used to some things...

Cars only have one spare tire - Be smart with redundancy

Technical folks often times are perfectionists, which means they want to build reliable, fault tolerant systems. This is a good thing, but you need to be wary of falling into the trap of overbuilding redundancy.

A wise man once reminded me that a car only has one spare tire. This came up because we were building out our disaster recovery site and the team thought it would be a good idea to have a clustered email environment, on new hardware of course, at the recovery site.

Don’t get me wrong clusters are always good, but they also cost more. Instead we decided to save the 25k that would have been used on the servers to fund a real test of our recovery plan. In hindsight it was a much better choice. A recovery site ideally is never used so why over spend on it.

We are actually debating on whether we should spend for the redundant servers we do for clusters. I mean if it’s part of a cluster already do we really need RAID drives and redundant power, or is the fact that it is already redundant good enough. The verdict is still out, and the cost to add RAID and a redundant power supply isn't that much when you only buy a few servers at a time, but for someone with a huge data center, like Google or Microsoft, the cost savings could be dramatic.

You should do the analysis on your environment and see where technology went just a little too far, and see if you can either reduce new purchases, or at least reuse some that you already made.

Social is more than a company account

There are a lot of companies that have a company facebook or linkedin page. Many have a corporate twitter account, or more than one. This is a good thing and those companies are likely doing good with their social presence.

The problem with this approach is it really doesn't scale that well. Imaging a company with 1000 employees. If they have one or two people focused on social media, that's good. They can probably build a few thousand followers, have regular blog posts and updates on their corporate pages.

If they spent that time and effort on training the 1000 employees on the proper use of social media, encouraged their employees to tweet, or post photos on pinterest or talk about work on their facebook pages or in their linkedin updates then instead of reaching a few thousand people, now you can reach a few hundred thousand people.

I recently had a linkedin update turn into a really good sales lead. The interesting thing was I am not the social media representative of my company. In fact I'm not in sales, or marketing. I do though update my linkedin connections with relevant updates from my company and one of those is what prompted the lead.

Now there are some risks which is why you need to train and educate people to avoid some of the "twitter disasters" that regularly make the media. You also need to have a great company culture and employee morale. Luckily we have both but if employees hate your company or aren't engaged then this is either not going to provide much value, or can cause brand damage.Though if you have unhappy employees you really need to fix that regardless of social media.

Leveraging the entire company to help market and brand your compay and products can really help increase awareness and revenue. It's not without risks, but all rewards come with risks.

Common decency isn't as common as it should be

I remember when I was younger (some would say much younger - I wouldn't) I remember breaking my leg. Kids break their legs a lot that's not the story. At the time I was old enough to mow lawns to make money and had six or so that I would cut on a regular basis. To make sure I didn't lose the customers, my father filled in for me.

After the first week he came back in and sputtered " I don't know what you are charging those people, but you should double it. You know not one of them offered me so much as a glass of water?". I think his language may have been a tad more colorful, but you can get his meaning. He told me, "Anytime someone comes to your house to do work or visit, you at least offer them a drink of water. That's just common decency"

Now it may be the decent thing to do, but I wonder how common it is nowadays. 

I know when we have our new flooring installed next week at home, we'll have soda and snacks available to offer them. We usually will offer to make the workers a sandwich for lunch. I remember my father's lesson, water is the least you offer. Almost every time we do this for a crew working at our house, they are shocked and amazingly grateful that we treated them with what I would call basic kindness. I mean it's a sandwich, not prime rib and lobster tails...

We do the same thing when we hire employees or contractors. To me they are still part of the family and should be treated like the rest of the team, regardless of how they get paid. We invite all of the team, contractors, part time folks, co-ops etc to our department events. I know not everyone does that and it seems wrong. 

That basic kindness should be common decency, not extraordinary.