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The New IT Crisis
Matey-O writes "You've succeeded in delivering 5 9's, your server farm is a well oiled machine, the helpdesk lines lie dormant. No? Well then how do you get credit for the work you do, when all that's noticed is the downtime? When the IT budget has to be justified, and you're overworked, undermanned, and you have to apply three patches to 100 servers before Close of Business, what has to change in IT before we melt down? Marc Andreessen has an interesting article on what has to happen to IT next."
and you have to apply three patches to 100 servers before Close of Business
Not flaming, but a fact.. Microsoft SMS will get that done for you with a couple of clicks.. literally..
And we're expecting to receive a beta copy of SMS 2003 (incl. Active Directory, the big feature).. so i'm kind of looking forward to that..
I have to say.. even though we run 2000 on our servers.. SMS is a dam good product and a timesaver!
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
Ok. Just becuase it Marc Andreessen doens't mean that it's news. This is an editorial, not an article.
You mean Marc Andressen of Loudcloud, who sell server and datacentre management services, and who are desperate for revenue? That Marc Andressen?
It isn't even an editorial, it's free advertising disguised as a story. I hope they're paying whoever owns Slashdot this week for it.
My company does IT outsourcing for several local companies, inluding one that has several remote divisions.
We are NEVER allowed enough time to do more than barely keep things running. Which always leads to things breaking that could easily have been prevented had someone been there to do routine maitenance.
New deployments (like a Linux server that does remote access for terminal emulation) that I do are compromised by the fact that I'm never given more time than is needed to barely get it working. I never truly get to finish a job to my own high standards.
My employer views this service contract as "nonbillable hours" despite the fact that they pay us $9K a month for it. The boss wants myself and our other engineers working on other "billable" projects that bring in far less than that $9K. That money doesn't get this company a SINGLE dedicated contract employee (despite the fact that our whole tech staff's monthly salaries don't equal $9K)
Not only that, our company recently fired our most talented engineer without cause (the week before Thanksgiving) becuase he could hire a "paper tiger" (ie: MCSE) for $5K a year less, and a H1-B who he brought in and treats like a slave.
It's definately the dark side of IT oursourcing, and something that companies considering doing this should think about.
If I were going to outsource an IT department for a company with multiple locations and servers, I'd keep at least ONE in-house guy and use the outsource company soley for the "it's broken" crises which need more manpower.
Corporatism != Free Market
Marc Andreessen has an interesting article on what has to happen to IT next.
I'm going to hazard a guess that this will forecast the overworked, underpaid endgame of IT gruntwork and usher in a new era where companies with CUSTOMIZED SERVICES and NEXT GENERATION TECHNOLOGY come in and automate IT and drastically reduce every admin's workload. He happens to run just a company that provides these services.
I will now read the article and be amazed if that isn't exactly what he says.
LoudCloud sold all of the data center hosting business to EDS. His company now develops software to 'manage more efficiently' those datacenters they couldn't make any money on. Obviously, the business model is 'if I couldn't do it and make $$$, then no other company in the world can either and they must be willing to pay me lots of $$$$ to allow them to'.
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Marc Andreessen sounds an awful lot like a lot of IT managers these days. You know, the people who say lots and know nothing. Boardrooms are filled with the notion that IT people are an automaton army that needs to be micromanaged right to the last char and nanosecond. Andreessen sounds like the propogator of this notion.
In two paragraphs he pronounced to the world the basically all IT infrastructure and paradigms are broken. He later suggests that in order to keep up and succeed, things will have to change.
Duh.
The article is so short on details of the failure and possible solutions, I don't know why he wasted the space and bandwidth to deliver this most elegant piece of fluff.
Fortune 2000 and enterprise in general has been raping its IT payroll for well over a year, probably close to two years. In that space, technology has changed, service delivery ramped up to top up the cuts-enhanced bottom line, media reinvented itself 4 or 5 times, and customers got a whole lot pickier and smarter.
So the one piece of non-fluff in the article was the mention that a lot of data centers are being held together with spit and string. Well, this is what happens when you whip 5 people to do the work of 20. Seems like thats ok to do as long as the victoms have ballpoint pens in their shirt pockets and hornrimmed glasses perched on the noses.
The biggest problem in the IT field these days is entrenched in the problems Tim Perdue experienced at SF. Every time an achievement is approached, 45000 know-it-alls with 6 digit incomes glom on, take credit, and micromanage at the DNA level. The suits, blissful in their ignorance and trusting of middlemanagement, believe the stuff that spews out of these ninnies mouths. The solution is for upper management and grassroots IT people, the folks in the trenches, to get together.
Upper management, in order to be able to do this, needs to be sensitized to the machinations of IT people. They need to know what makes us tick, or they risk finding out what makes us ticked off. They best be doing this quick too. The downturn will end, business will pick up, and a lot of these companies will be up a creek with their infrastructure decay and miniscule overmanaged IT budgets.
Revenge of the nerds indeed.
-- Karma whore? You betcha. --
Well then you should try Nagios (Used to be Netsaint). Does all sorts of monitoring and 2D maps of systems (and their status) or a 3D VRML map! Doesn't do histograms though... In all seriousness though, it really is a neat piece of software and very handy.
There is a problem with this mentality. It's kinda
once sided.
"If these damn smelly hippy UNIX admins could learn
to act more like good corporate lapdogs, we'd make
a bundle"
Not to say there isn't some validity in there. But
the other side of that coin is:
"If these retarded, non-tech savvy idiots gave me
a boss that understands technology, didn't let
the morons in marketing make promises they didn't
check if we could keep. If HR didn't have so much
power they effectively ruin the company..." and
so on adnauseum.
The real problem stems from the "us" versus
"them" philosophy. "Gotta have a strong manager
watch over them there technogeeks or they'll walk
all over us". And the "You don't need a technical
person to manage technical people" mentality also.
It has to do with the level of fear a
non-technical person has about technical people.
Because technical people "know things". And they
are probably "trying to trick you". So the ball
starts in their court. Most of the time upper
managment fumbles that ball all the hell, and
deserves the treatment they get from their
overworked, underpaid wage slaves that they don't
listen too or appreciate. That's just my opinion
after 14 years in the business from both sides
of the fence.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
The way I usually see a Citrix deployment handled, the laptops are all configured with modem dial-in access to the Citrix server (via VPN). They also have a full installation of the most-used applications (MS Office, for example?) that they'd want to work with "offline".
Then, it's just a matter of training for people to understand that they need to copy their completed work up to their shared disk space on the server when they get a chance. If you keep the versions of software on the server and on the laptops the same, all should go pretty smoothly.
(Of course, this also undermines some of the supposed cost-benefit of Citrix, because you're still buying full software licenses for each laptop, plus all your user licenses for everyone potentially connecting to the Citrix servers.)
My team runs just under 6 dozen web and database servers ( Solaris and Linux ) for the University of Michigan using an open source system management suite called 'radmind' and I can't say enough good things about it ( I'm not one of its developers, so I can get away with this ): fast, secure, stable, standards based, and makes a little thing like patching several dozen servers a breeze ( though ... what kind of freak patches in the middle of the day? ).
Incidentally, the CTO of loudcloud ( a.k.a. opsware ) is Tim Howes, of LDAP fame and formerly of the UMich RSUG ( the same group that has since developed radmind ). small world.