Blade Watch

So we left Mike wanting to upgrade all the servers from Windows 2000 to Windows 2008 in order to keep everything up to date, to reduce support costs and stay in vendor support.

Chris what we up and what are your priorities?

• Reduce call outs for on call
• Implement defragmentation on some key systems
• Upgrade firmware and drivers to keep everything up to date
• Get rid of anything older than HP Proliant G3 servers.
• Get rid of the problem servers
• Make security patching easier, quicker
• Fix the citrix servers – they’ve been high maintenance recently
• Ensure our inventory is up to date
• Share information about the server estate/the applications so I know what to do at 3am when something  goes on holiday and takes down the back office systems?
• Tune the monitoring so we’re monitoring what we should be to reduce on call or maybe include the nice to have stuff like fragmentation /hardware monitoring tools etc
• Improve our relationship with the business – give me an easier life
• Make remote working easier so that I don’t necessarily need to be tied to a company laptop to reboot a server on Saturday at 1pm or have Ops do it
• Work on and implement new standards for support, configuration etc.
• Play with Windows 2008 and start deploying that so we don’t get too out of date
• Improve our help desk stats and maintain delivery so we can avoid debates
• Work more as a team, sharing workload and information – avoid the master of one system
• Reduce our weekend work? Whether we ever do this is another thing though
• Make information more accessible – 80 page support documents are nearly useless at 2am when they don’t answer simple questions – what is the order of service to restart the application?

Chris’ priorities are BAU, their from a support standpoint, he’s wanting to:

• Make is life easier
• Illustrate his delivery to the end users
• Improve communication to his clients
• Centralize the support fuinctions/data and make it easier
• Reduce or rebalance the workload
• Refresh and renew the infrastructure – but is this not in a way to reduce or make his life easier, the delivery more effective?
• Avoid the running to keep still way of working – the need to stabilize the core and move on from there

What key challenges do you face then?

• Architecture is designed by an architecture team which covers infrastructure world – little interface with the business architecture teams on what they’re working on – standards which aren’t therefore always compatible
• Standard that might be cross business and therefore not suitable for our environment
• Discussions on support levels/delivery and on call/working hours
• Complexity of the infrastructure through organizational change – to apply a driver pack to one server might require three business units to sign it off – do I have the time to bother?
• A focus on the big picture, but not looking at the component parts – you need to reduce outages, but why are we having these outages, and what operationally and from an investment standpoint needs done
• Having to know everything – VMware, network, storage, citrix, inhouse and external application – what does that mean for my skills?
• Time to establish a wiki page to store information, to share knowledge and communicate with our clients
• Time to note what issues we’re having and noting them for the team to transfer skill sets
• Time to write proper documentation for each of the systems we support

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