IT’s fear of Self-love

Why, oh why, can’t the IT department boldly love themselves

ROBERT YAWE CEO, SYNAPTECH SOLUTIONS

Self-love is very important for one’s sanity and peace of mind and it only can come from within as no other person understands you better than yourself.

Even though this should be self-evident, for some strange reason, it isn’t for many of those in the IT space especially where the true geek is concerned. You would expect that those in the technology space would use the skills and tools at their disposal to make themselves as comfortable as possible in executing their work, but they do not.

You would expect that any IT person responsible for infrastructure or support would implement a ticketing system so as to maintain an audit trail of activities. For the uninitiated, think of an audit trail simply as a blockchain aka an immutable record.

Before SNMP became the norm, any time something went wrong, it would take hours or even days to understand what occurred. In the infrastructure space, this is a recent reality in that for a long time after network switches went smart, the infrastructure had remained dumb.

One realised that a UPS or PDU had been overloaded when it finally tripped, which meant that you now had an entire outage to deal with. In many cases, the true culprit would not be identified as things would somehow resolve themselves.

So, the next time it occurred it would be as much of a shock as the previous time as no one had any record of what was happening just before the outage.

Today, most of the infrastructure in a data centre can be monitored and for power distribution units (PDUs), you can monitor it down to the port level with the ability to activate, reset or deactivate ports as well as monitor the load allowing you to remotely or automatically reset a hang device.

Add to this IP capability and you can now get alerts and also monitor the device remotely which gives you the capability to be proactive to a situation as opposed to reactive. Add into the mix a syslog server and you now have access to everything that happened and is happening. Throw in a dashboard and all is bliss.

Surprisingly enough, I have walked into data centres of organisations whose entire survival depends on their technology remaining up and found what we call dumb PDUs. And in some cases, trailing sockets that would be more at home on the floor of a studio apartment where there is a single socket in the corner of the room.

I blame the condition mainly on the fact that most IT equipment purchases has been abdicated to the procurement department. But it is actually because the IT teams have no self-love. They would rather spend the whole night with their fingers and toes crossed than put their foot down against the lords of the procurement department.

The case of the PDU overload was a real situation. The cause was a server whose internal fans would rev up due to an increase in processing which meant that the server drew more power resulting in the overload.

If the PDU was monitored, the IT team would have been notified if the load exceeded a certain threshold. But since the procurement team felt that the monitored IP enabled PDU was too expensive, and the IT team did not have sufficient self-love to defend its decision, the outages will continue to happen, unabated.

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