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Building an IT Infrastructure Today vs. 10 Years Ago
rjupstate sends an article comparing how an IT infrastructure would be built today compared to one built a decade ago.
"Easily the biggest (and most expensive) task was connecting all the facilities together. Most of the residential facilities had just a couple of PCs in the staff office and one PC for clients to use. Larger programs that shared office space also shared a network resources and server space. There was, however, no connectivity between each site -- something my team resolved with a mix of solutions including site-to-site VPN. This made centralizing all other resources possible and it was the foundation for every other project that we took on. While you could argue this is still a core need today, there's also a compelling argument that it isn't. The residential facilities had very modest computing needs -- entering case notes, maintaining log books, documenting medication adherence, and reviewing or updating treatment plans. It's easy to contemplate these tasks being accomplished completely from a smartphone or tablet rather than a desktop PC."
How has your approach (or your IT department's approach) changed in the past ten years?
The cloud is fine and dandy until Microsoft Azure is unreachable for several hours ... again ...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/21/azure_blips_offline_again/
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
That's good, but reality is more like...
Determine the deadline, if at all possible, don't consult anyone with experience building infrastructure.
Force committal to the deadline, preferably with hints of performance review impact.
Ensure purchasing compliance via your internal systems, which minimally take up 30% to 40% of the remaining deadline.
Leave the equipment locked in a storage room for a week, just to make sure. Or, have an overworked department be responsible for "moving" it, that's about a week anyway.
Put enormous amounts of pressure on the workers once the equipment arrives. Get your money's work, make them sweat.
When it's obvious they can't achieve a working solution in 30% (due to other blockers) of the allotted time, slip the schedule a month three days before the due date; because, it isn't really needed until six months from now.
That's how it is done today. No wonder people want to rush to the cloud.
For good or bad (and yes, there's some of both), virtualization is the single biggest change. It is central to our infrastructure. It drives many, if not most, of our other infrastructure design decisions. I could write paragraphs on the importance of integration and interoperability when it comes to (for example) storage or networking, but let it suffice to say that it is a markedly different landscape than that of 2003.