Blade Watch

I was speaking with one of my CIO friends today. He had asked for a survey of the server build process and of their storage room, where all the bits arrived and were kept. It was only because he had asked one of the managers to look at the way they build servers, reduce the delays and take a big picture view that they discovered:

• The servers were ordered and supplied with a CD ROM drive – but they then purchased a separate DVD drive as the operating system build was on dvd
• The servers often got ordered with an extra network card (if they were being used in a cluster or had specific requirements) – despite the server having 2 or four on board ports
• The servers were ordered with US power cables but they often either used the ones they had or purchased UK ones when required

As a result they had 127 cd rom drives, 93 sets of power cables and a number of network cards which had been purchased with the server. The CIO’s point? Where were we? Why had no one noticed and how much had we ‘wasted’ by not paying attention to detail?

The disconnect?

The purchasing team phoned the vendor and said “give me one of those servers”, the IT Manager/Project Manager quoted that it must “have 4GB RAM or 4 cpus, 146GB drives”, but they did not read through the quotation, they checked for processors, memory and drives. The ’standard’ quotation, the ’standard’ build and configuration included things which were not needed. Thus the company had spent time and effort, ordering components that were not needed and got either put in the bin, or stored ‘just in case’, just before he hung up he asked me:

“Want a propitiatory IDE cd drive, we’ve got 127 of them, we can throw in some power cables as well. Do you know they only admitted to me that the build is dvd based, very useful.?”

The server engineer assumed that someone knew the company was collecting hot swap cd rom drives, power cables and network cards. The manager followed the architecture teams specifications for servers and purchasing ordered what the vendor and purchasing had specified, “we need a server with a dvd drive”, UK power cables and another network card, it needs to be 4 processors, 16GB RAM and 8x 146GB hard drives”. The CIO just thought that the process worked, that purchasing would automatically look at the quote check what we purchased was needed, but they were ordering so many items, the server was just another one of those items, the thought the project manager, the business sponsor and the architect all knew what was being purchased.

We need to look at the big picture, combining the technology with the process, looking at what is delaying everything from the specification of requirements, the ordering and delivery, down to the operating system load and configuration.

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