Bladewatch.com

Chris told me this story, whilst I called him to see how Canary Wharf was these days:

“Hi Danny, can you give me an audit/inventory of the Windows server estate?” Asked the head of IT.

Chris had been asked to produce a report of all the Windows servers and he was telling me that their manager had insisted on doing a full audit of all the servers. A registry scan a list of applications installed, whether it had IIS, what version of Windows and IIS were installed, how many cpus and disk space it had. He then merged using Excel this list with the data center inventory so that we could have tape drives and disk shelves attached to the servers in the report.

(Example data below):
Server19 – DL360 – G19 – Production Build server – Windows 2000
Server19 – Disk shelf – G19 – disk shelf to production build server
Server20 – DL380 – G19 – Production Active Directory – Windows 2000

The manager was most frustrated when the head of IT said:

“Thank you, but I only wanted to know how many windows servers we had. It’s for the data center project we talked about”

The manager was not displeased with what he had been given, it was more that it was not in the format, the style that he needed. He now had to filter out the disk shelf bits. He simply needed a list of servers with their model type and location. The rest was imaterial to the meeting that he was about to attend.

A communication break down. An error, “computer says no situation”. But you see, there are inventories and there are asset style data intensive let’s debate to the end of time inventories. “Is that dvd drive for server19 or server22 – for billing it might matter, but for high level what if scenarios, it’s not so much an issue?”

What we needed to establish was what derivative of data is core to your report so that we can establish whether you need a data center physical audit, or just we’ve got 900 windows servers, of which 123 are DL360′s 174 are Dell 1950′s, we have 14 IBM X3550s and the rest are a Compaq/HP mix.

Chris’ head of IT needed to move some of the servers about, free up some space in preparation for them to move to their nice new data center. For that he needs to know:

• How many servers there are
• How many are windows/unix/linux/tru64/solaris etc
• What type of servers there are – HP/DEC/Dell/IBM/Sun
• What applications run on those servers.

The head of IT failed to articulate what he meant by I need an inventory of the windows server estate, and the manager failed to ask what level of detail he needed. What he meant in effect by inventory.

Keep in mind, if I decide that I will move 147 servers next Tuesday, I will do the following typically:

• Audit the server from an operating system point of view
• Check the networking and storage attached
• Confirm if there are any ‘weirdness’s’ like a tape drive, 3 storage shelves plugged in the back

So what is core to this task is:

• How many windows servers there are.
• What hardware platform they are running on
• Their location

The rest, we can provide more information as requested, because this is an overview, a summary if you like upon which to make decisions at the top level.  The “what if we virtualized all DL580 G2 servers, what space would we re-claim and what business lines/applications would be impacted” or “if we virtualized all the internal IT systems, what could we free up in the data center?”

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.