While recently wading through the sea of humanity and waiting in some of the infernal lines that define Disney at this time of year, I was struck by an interesting IT analogy early in the week (yes, I really did need a vacation, and by the end of the week I wasn’t thinking about IT at all).

In last June and early July, the number of baby-strollers per square foot in the Magic Kingdom increases to approximately 10x the normal rate.  This forces one to put up with gives one many opportunities to observe other people’s children under extreme conditions. It’s amazing to watch parents expect their 5-year olds to behave like perfect angels in subtropical queue lines for upwards of 45 minutes, or sprint from one end of a park to another on tiny, tired little legs to score a Toy Story Fast-Pass before they’re all gone. It’s amazing because you can tell these kids are perfect hellions under ideal conditions as well. Putting them under stress only intensifies the problems that already exist.

Likewise, if you’ve got poorly designed or neglected infrastructure, simply moving it to a colo facility isn’t going to improve up-time or performance significantly, if at all. Certainly you can improve environmentals, save capex, and get lower network latency with a colo move, but if application response time and reliability are sucking wind before the move because of bad design or sysadmin neglect, not much is going to change.

My point isn’t that you should avoid putting your infrastructure in a better home if you need to, but that you shouldn’t expect it to behave any differently just because you moved it. Moreover, move time is not the time to make drastic changes to your production systems. It’s not a “free” outage window.  The more changes you make during a move, the higher the risk of a failed, or at minimum a very stressful move.

On the other hand, a move can be an ideal time to upgrade to better hardware and legitimately raise your expectations. For example, you can set up new hardware next to your old, cluster it, and then move the new half of the cluster to a better home while the old half continues to run the business. After you complete the move and let the clusters resynchronize, you can turn down the old cluster and all activity will automatically switch over to the new hardware. Your users will never feel a thing. Very little pain, but very much gain.

Of course that all sounds good, and there are a lot of details involved in making it happen, but that’s what we do best. If you’re interested  in smoothly moving your critical IT gear to a new home and need some experienced help to get it done, give us call. Hardware prone to temper tantrums is one of our specialties.

//spk

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Does this sound like your IT shop?  Reports from the Uptime Institute consistently show that the majority of reliability and uptime woes aren’t caused by hardware,  facilities, or utility failure – they’re caused by humans, and what pray tell are those humans doing?  They’re changing things, and often too much of the change isn’t planned, approved, or documented.  Or, there is simply too much change going on at one time.

Much like a bomb is meant to explode, technicians are meant to be technical, so it’s a bit unrealistic to assume they’re giving a lot of thought to managing change, much less be fond of doing so. They just want to git ‘er done, and in large part, we pay them well to not only do that, but to do it right the first time.  Hard core techies, the ones that really know how to make things work, typically aren’t also wired for sitting in management meetings. The problem with managing change is that it’s boring. It’s not technical. And explaining highly technical things to non-technical folks in a change management meeting is not always the average techie’s strong suite, nor perhaps the best use of their time. To the contrary, it can be a very frustrating experience for them, which can lead them down the Dark Side of making changes beneath the radar. Effective change management therefore becomes a bit of a balancing act. We need to know what’s going on, but we don’t want to bog everyone down in the process.

In our data center controlling change is not optional. Reliability demands it, as do the Spanish Inquisition SAS 70 auditors. But we’ve found a way to manage it without terribly burdening our technical staff. Change requests may be formally entered in the system by any authorized individual whether or not they are technical;  they are simply the person requesting the change. The request is then routed to a technician who can assess what needs to be done, adds those details to the request, makes a suggestion as to when it might be done, and then it’s passed on to someone in management who can assess the risk and approve/disapprove it. If a change is of major significance, the request comes before a Change Advisory Board (CAB) for final approval. Technicians, while welcome, are not required to attend CAB meetings.  When requests are properly documented, the CAB is almost always able to make a good decision without further involving the technical staff.  When the CAB does need more information or defers a  request for some reason (e.g. too many changes on one night), the technician in question is notified and it’s handled outside of a meeting.  This saves time, money, and mental fatigue. Since the pain threshold is relatively low, this method also encourages all change activity to actually be run through the proper channels.

Our process is capable of handling very high rates of change, but that doesn’t mean that we do so.  On the contrary, we try to minimize the rate of change, batching things together when it makes sense to  minimize outages, and spreading them out when the risk is high to maximize uptime.

Managing change is not fun, and you may be justifiably weary of it.  Let us take that burden off of your shoulders.

//spk

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Indeed, we are designed to always stay running. In less than 6 hours we will begin moving a live production environment of nearly 120 servers from their current home approximately 60 miles away into new racks in our facility. Those servers are coming here in part because keeping up with the always-on demands of today’s infrastructures is increasing more difficult and expensive to do.  It has come to the point where if IT infrastructure is not your core business, it’s awfully difficult to justify the ever rising costs of running an always-on environment yourself.

We’ve spent months getting ready for this move, and now in these hours before “go time”, it is eerily quiet in that part of the data center. Other than the hum of CRAC units and core switch fans, not a creature is stirring.  The patch cables are sorted in boxes with care, in hopes that people with servers soon will be there (sorry, couldn’t resist).  But once completed, the large precisely choreographed effort required to move our new customer into a better home will result in always-on uptime at  a fraction of what it would cost to build from scratch or remodel.

Since all of the data center details for this move are already cared for, it’s now time to make sure the most important item is covered:  three shifts-worth of fine coffee.

//spk

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//spk

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The “red one” is none other than the Emergency Power Off button, and here on the east coast it’s pretty hard to build a data center without one. What?! You don’t have one?  Shhhh…I won’t tell.  You’re secret is safe with me. Here’s what a real EPO red button looks like in case you’ve never seen one.

Notice the label. I firmly believe it should also say “UPDATE YOUR RESUME BEFORE PRESSING” as pressing this is in most cases is a resume-generating, if not career-ending event.  Why? When activated, this button’s job is to do one thing, and one thing only: cut the power to your data center. All of it. Let that sink in for a moment. Think through that what that would mean in your shop.  No power. No sound. Just deafening silence, that is of course, unless you pressed it by accident and the silence gives way to the sound of clanging pitch forks and the smell of torches being lit over in the end-user community.

I am obviously a bit biased about this topic. I don’t think these systems are necessary, but you should do some research and draw your own conclusions. I am 100% all for safety, but from the historical evidence I’ve seen, the risk that EPO is designed to mitigate is lower than what you’re exposed to driving to work every day.  APC’s white paper #22 pretty much nails it:

EPO is a subsystem that is specifically designed to override all redundancy and fault tolerance built into the
network-critical physical infrastructure (NCPI), thereby putting the entire network at risk. EPO operation is
one of the largest causes of unplanned data center shutdown. The design of an EPO system must
therefore try to prevent any possibility of accidental operation, and it must minimize deliberate operation for
any reason other than a valid life-threatening emergency. [Emphasis mine]

Red buttons are no panacea, but we are nevertheless forced to install then, and then make them nigh unto impossible to press unless you Really Mean It.  Note in the photo above that the button is both recessed and protected by a plastic cover. Without the plastic cover, the recessed nature of the button is the only thing preventing it from accidentally being bumped and also hopefully slows down a would-be pusher enough to stop and ask “Do I Really Mean It?” Speaking of the cover, note also the small gray loop of wire in the upper left corner of the housing – we opted to install covers with alarms. Lifting the cover results in a piercing electronic squeal capable of  penetrating 2-hour fire-rated walls and forces one once again to stop and ask “Do I Really Mean It?”  Cover alarms are designed to stop non-data center savvy electricians and others from innocently doing something disastrous, such as pressing the red button before installing a new circuit breaker. Yes, it happens. Well, the label does contain the word “off”, doesn’t it?  Changing the label from “Electrical Power Off” to “Emergency Power Off” tends to alter the results little.  The word “off” seems to be the Pavlovian trigger.

Disarming Considerations

As I write this, our EPO system is being expanded to accommodate the growth of our operations. If you are building a new data center with EPO, make sure the designer includes a way to disable the system during maintenance and expansion activities. This seems like an obvious feature to include, but don’t take it for granted. This is also a handy feature to have if your operations are prone to having “civilians” in the data center, i.e. those who are unfamiliar with the various buttons and switches on the walls. It is very reassuring to be able to disarm the red buttons while such folks are meandering about the room. Even when escorted, such folks have been known to find ways to activate the EPO system, either accidentally by bumping a non-recessed red button, or deliberately pushing it out of curiosity when no one is watching.

A Marriage Made In Hell

Once you have an EPO system in place, you will have to learn to live with it.  It is a risk that must be managed like all the others. If you’re building a new data center, you at least have the opportunity to design and build it properly, and then test it without jeopardizing your operations. Retrofitting an existing data center with EPO or expanding an existing system is a different matter entirely. You will want to engage an engineering firm and electricians that are very experienced with EPO systems, as most electricians are not familiar with the complexities involved with wiring EPO into a live data center environment. There is no second chance to get it right.

Here is scary story that makes my point.  Cutting to the chase, the article states:

About a month after opening a new facility in March 2003, Roberts, the director of data center services for Novi, Mich.-based Trinity Health, got a call. It was Easter morning, and a contractor had accidentally activated the EPO switch as he tried to replace a module connecting the button to the fire alarm system. According to Roberts, the fiasco “took the data center out.”

“We went out at 8:30 that morning,” he said. “By 11:30 that night, we were probably 95% up and going, so we were pretty lucky. But from that day forward, I tried to lessen the effect of this EPO.”

Lessen the effect indeed. This not the kind of resurrection we want to be talking about on Easter Sunday.

Stress Relief Department

After all of this talk about outages, and with my own data center’s EPO being modified as we speak, it’s time for some needed stress relief:

Happy Easter!

//spk

P.S. I did press the red button, several times actually, but it wasn’t in a live situation.  It was during the initial testing of our system.  The lead engineer said “May as well press it now if you want, because you never will again.”  Hopefully he was a genuine prophet.

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Racks – Label both front and back doors. We use a scheme based on the row number and position within the row, such that the first rack in row 5 would be labeled “5A”, the second “5B’, etc.  Other folks use the time-honored  “Battleship”-style system, based on an XY grid that maps out the room, most often based on two-foot squares that make up a typical raised floor system.

An example would be “AJ06″, where the “X” coordinate is “AJ” and the “Y” is “06″. Neither method is necessarily superior to the other, and we happen to use both. We use the row/rack scheme for our racks and XY coordinates for infrastructure items like Air Handlers, floor PDUs, chilled water valves, etc. The reason we use row/rack rather than XY coordinates is that in a large room full of equipment, it is often hard to see the grid system on the walls and figure out where things are located. We believe it’s easier for a new sysadmin to find rack 5C (row 5, third rack) than to ask him to find rack BQ59 in a room chocked full of racks where he can’t see any latitude/longitude markers on the walls to get his bearings. Again, there is neither right nor wrong here; just a couple of different ways to approach it.

Servers and Network Gear – Label both the front and the back. The name is probably sufficient. Security-sensitive folks in your shop may balk at using IP addresses on server labels.

PDUs and power whips – Both floor and in-rack units. If you have an A+B redundant power distribution system, everything can be tagged with a number to identify the unit and a color to indicate to which  feed (“A” or “B”) it’s attached. Note in the pictures how this flows all the way through – even the whips are colored.

Patch Panels – We could talk about patch panel labeling schemes for days. The important thing to do is pick one system and stick with it. Here’s a look at ours. We label our panels using a a “source/destination” scheme, so in the photo “1A/1D (1-6)” means that these are the first 6 ports running from rack 1A (the rack this panel is in) to rack 1D. Very easy for new sysadmins to grasp. This does not follow the ballyhooed TIA standard for labeling patch panels, but we find it be very practical and easy for the people working in the room.

Cables – Labeling cables is a religious issue for another day also, but in our data center we typically only label the key cables in the network backbone and edges  so that trouble shooting is easier at 3 AM. When we do label a cable, we label each end with a wrap-around style label that identifies where the other end of the cable can be found. You can see an example of this in the photo above.  If you click on the photo to enlarge it, you can almost read the label.

Air Handler (a.k.a “CRAC”) units – Simple to do, and very helpful when the units send alarms to systems management tools.

Emergency Power Off (EPO) and Fire suppression controls – I actually think the EPO button should be labeled “Update Resume Before Pushing,” but that’s a topic for another day.

Mechanical Support Systems -  Here you need to not only identify the control accurately, but sometimes you need to be very specific about it’s operation:

After all the hard work of designing and implementing a label system is done, you’ll need to put ongoing enforcement into place for which a label shouldn’t be necessary:

Take-away: What’s most important is that you pick a labeling system that works for you and is easily maintainable, because it needs to be useful, and it’s a never ending process. If it’s confusing to use or a pain to keep up to date, even Bubba and his .50 cal aren’t going to help.

//spk

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If you Google “systems management” or “systems monitoring” you’ll quickly learn that these tools are now essentially commodity software.  There are dozens, if not several hundred reinvented wheels out there to choose from, whether they be free, ad-supported, or pay-for products.  In fact, the space is so full of purple cows at this point that one has trouble judging between the shades.  If you’re thinking of doing a start-up to produce Yet Another Systems Management Tool, differentiating yourself will be the primary challenge.  Writing the software will be only 10% of your effort.

So, with all the eligible prospects out there, how does one select a systems management tool?  All of the worthwhile products have the same set of basic features: discovery & polling, thresholding and alerting, and data collection and reporting. Many of them also sport attractive eye candy in the form of topographical status displays (the practical usefulness of which is often questionable and a subject for another day) and three dimensional displays of node relationships and performance data. Some can do performance base-lining from which they are able to tell when a system begins to deviate from it’s normal performance profile.  More ambitious products attempt to correlate the blizzard of event traffic blowing through the network and do root-cause analysis.  The best ones are highly configurable, extensible, and offer great API’s, because no matter what you product you select, you will invariably be faced with some amount of customization to make it really fit your environment.

We narrowed our search to products that reflected the ideas  guiding the design of our own in-house tool until we will ceased its development several years ago. We were headed to the next level of system managements: provide business views of our operations.  Most tools focus strictly on the status of discrete elements and their resources, e.g. a router is down, a server is out of disk space, etc.  While that’s certainly useful information to a degree, the real question is, what does it mean to my business?   If disk space is low on a test server, how much do I care?  Should a red light on that condition cause a severity 1 ticket to be opened?  Is the downed router affecting my ability to ship product or simply the archiving of my 2009 backups?

We looked for a tool that could take the various elements that make up our major business systems and allow them to be defined under a small set of  dashboard lights, one for each business system, that would help us understand the impact of the various events occurring across the enterprise.  So, for example, if the “Order Entry” light goes red, we know it’s an all-hands-on-deck situation because of the well-known equation: no orders=no revenue.  If on the other hand, the “R&D” light goes red where all of test systems are located, there is no need to call in the cavalry.

Because human resources are not easily cloned in a crisis, the relative business value of a red light is extremely important to know when multiple red lights are on at the same time. Which ones should get the immediate attention of our limited human resources, and in what order?   A business view answers those questions, especially if you happen to know the dollar cost of downtime for each of your business systems.

Being in the hosting business, we also needed a tool that could segregate our customers into their own groups and provide a similar business view capability. This feature, usually referred to as “multi-tenancy,” typically comes with the ability to give each customer a personalized view into the business systems hosted in our facility.

After several months of shaking the trees and examining their fruits, we settled on Traverse. It does the basics well, has multi-tenancy, and supports business views. The company appears to be stable. The team that came on-site to help with implementation was capable, and the price didn’t break the bank. While I’m not endorsing Traverse as the be-all-end-all nirvana gotta-have-it systems management tool, it does meet our requirements, and it’s definitely an option worthy of your evaluation if you happen to be in the market for a new system.

With all this goodness, it would seem like our new fiancé is a keeper, and yet the ghost of Systems Management Tools Past still lingers.  Hopefully this relationship will last. Hmm…maybe we should sign a prenup…

//spk

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At this time of year my focus changes from IT to LIONEL infrastructure.  It’s time to begin building this year’s Christmas layout!   Ah, the joy of no project plan or business case!   And looking at the calendar, Christmas day is quite visible on the horizon, so I need to get moving.

With Christmas being on a Friday this year, the early days of that week will likely not be the most productive in the IT shop as the staff winds down the year with inter-office daytime soireés , extended “lunch hours” for last-minute shopping, vacation time, and so on.  From a online availability standpoint, this is clearly not the time to be making any major changes to your critical systems.

Here are a few ideas for redeeming the time during the slow days before Christmas Eve – those days when few creatures are stirring in your shop:

1. Check your software patch levels.  Are you up to date on critical systems?  If not, make plans to get current after the holidays.
2. Check you hardware maintenance agreements.  Is all your gear covered? How about the hardware that’s going out of warranty Real Soon Now? Are all you agreements current?
3. Check your software licenses.  Are you using more than you own?  Funny how that creeps up without notice.  You may want to square up with your vendors at year-end fire sale prices rather than wait until January.
4. Have your sysadmin’s check the free disk space across your server farm.  Is it time to order more storage, or simply clean out the dead wood?  If a file hasn’t been referenced in the last 12 months, archive it or ask the file owner if you may simply delete it.
5. Check for unnecessary VM sprawl.   Do you have virtual servers that you can decommission?
6. Review your backup strategy.   Are all of your critical systems included properly?
7. Test your recovery capability.  Try to recovery a file, a database, and perhaps even an entire server from backup.
8. Declare email bankruptcy and ask your users to do the same.  Don’t start 2010 with 2+GB’s of personal email.  Refuse to be part of the highest form of pack rattery and digital waste known to man.
9. Review your Internet bandwidth usage.  Do you need more or can you do with less?  Do you need to have a chat with any abusive power surfers?
10. Review your private bandwidth usage and contracts.  Are you nearing the end of any contracts?  Is it time to start shopping for better rates?

This is not a list of really exciting stuff to be sure, but they are all important, low-risk things you can do in the inevitable pre-Christmas lull to get your shop off to a good start in 2010.

Christmas Movie Review Department

There are many renditions of Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol” to chose from.   Arguably two of the best star Alistar Sim and George C. Scott, respectively. I personally prefer the George version , but you can’t go wrong with either.  You need at least one of these in your collection.

Christmas Train Department

Also, if you don’t have a train under your Christmas tree and you have kids, grand kids, or you just know kids in your neighborhood, you really ought to head to a hobby shop and check out the Lionel starter sets.   This one will look especially fine under your tree:

//spk

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While Anderson’s assertion may seem to be true from a philosophical standpoint, it’s not yet true an economic truth, or we wouldn’t have stories in USA Today talking about how YouTube is costing Google money. In June, Michael Liedtke authored a piece shedding some harsh light on the reality of “Free”:

Technology consultants RampRate projects YouTube’s operating losses this year at $174.2 million — far below the $470.6 million estimated by Credit Suisse analysts Spencer Wang and Kenneth Sena in an April research report that became a hot topic on Wall Street and the Internet.The big mystery is how much it costs Google to store and distribute the 20 hours of video that are sent to YouTube every minute.

After conferring with industry experts, Wang and Sena concluded Google will spend nearly $380 million on Internet bandwith, computer hardware, software and data centers.

But RampRate — a specialist in managing technology expenses — believes Google will spend about $83 million to provide the same things to YouTube.

The lower expense estimate presumes Google has negotiated money-saving deals with broadband providers and other behind-the-scenes players that play an integral role in moving data through the Internet’s pipes. RampRate also believes Google’s own propriety technology has helped hold down YouTube’s costs, an idea that Pichette endorsed in his Maclean’s interview.

Although it has been cutting costs to cope with the U.S. recession, Google can still afford to subsidize YouTube with the money it makes through its search engine. Google earned $4.2 billion last year and started off this year with a first-quarter profit of $1.4 billion.

“When people run models, they generally use standard industry pricing for bandwidth, storage, but we build everything from scratch,” [Google's] Pichette said at the time. “So we know our cost position but nobody else does.”

[emphasis added]

Does it seem logical that a service based on raw materials “too cheap to meter” should have trouble making money?  It’s certainly not my intention to discredit Anderson’s thesis about Free, on the contrary, I tend to agree with his primary point that dramatically decreasing costs will change not only the technology we use, but the very way we do business.  YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, all of which are Free, have already revolutionized the way we can all go to market for basically zero cost.

My point is more of a practical one. Bandwidth and storage continue to cost less, but they cost something significant enough that we still negotiate price when we purchase. Even Google does, though they won’t tell us how well they do it. We therefore need to be not only mindful of the cost, but of continuing to properly manage the capacity. Abundance tends to breed waste, and sooner or later Parkinson’s Law comes into effect, at which point we find ourselves breaking out the checkbook to buy more even of  the commodities that are seemingly “too cheap to meter.”

It is still best practice to put tools in place to monitor, control, and efficiently utilize bandwidth. The Internet OC-12 I priced just a few weeks ago was still measured in dollars per megabit, not cents.

It is also still best practice to manage storage, because it still costs real money also. What I mean by “manage” in this sense is giving your sysadmins tools and the time to go through the bowels of your storage systems and look stale old data that can either be deleted, archived to removable media, or moved to cheaper online storage. You couldn’t possibly have heard it, but that was the sound of 90,000 syadmin’s heads simultaneously exploding. For many sysadmins this kind of grunt work is simply beyond the pale, but notice I didn’t say it had to be a manual effort. There are great tools out there to help, FolderSizes being a personal favorite on the cheap end. If you have really deep pockets for some serious automation, IBM’s Tivoli Productivity Center for Data is the luxury car bus option.

And if you’re the one that gets stuck doing the storage management, don’t forget to head over to YouTube for an occasional break…while it’s still Free!  You can find some great “how-to” tips on cleaning your hard disk with an acetylene torch.

//spk

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Yes that’s right, clowns and coffee don’t go together, particularly this clown. We seem to know that instinctively, yet the blogosphere reports that we are apparently ignoring sound instinct in the name of price. The Clown is cheaper than Starbucks, and so we are enticed away from something of known, predictable quality to something, shall we say, less predictable.

McTreachery

Despite being a loyal Starbucks customer, last week I too swung by the local golden arches for a McLatte. Here’s how it went down at the drive-up’s McSpeaker box (imagine Charlie Brown’s teacher’s voice as you read the McSpeaker’s part):

McSpeaker:  Hello, may I take your order?

Me:  Yes, I’d like a medium cafe latte with skim milk.

McSpeaker:  Would you like whole or non-fat milk?

Me: Non-fat please.

McSpeaker: Hot or Cold?

Me: Hot.

McSpeaker: That will be $2.39.  Please pull around.

So far so good, despite my deliberate avoidance of the word “McLatte” or my faux pas of asking for skim rather than non-fat McMilk. I pull around to window #1, pay and receive my change, and proceed to window #2.  At window #2 I wait an eternity for the window to open.  Eventually a young, ponderously pierced McDude opens the window and presents me with a see-through plastic cup holding a milky substance with ice cubes in it. A new dialogue ensues:

Me: I’m sorry, this should have been made as a hot latte.  (said very politely)

McDude: Uh…really?

Me: Yes.   (The petulant McDude now checks the overhead order display for confirmation.)

McDude: Uh…OK…one minute.

As I settle in for another eternal wait, my server surprisingly appears in less than 20 seconds with the proper looking drink: a brown paper McCup with a black plastic McLid. I drive away, yet something seems wrong. The cup should be warm even though there’s a McSleeve to prevent me from suing them over a burned hand.  One sip, and I realized I’ve just been had. The devious McDude has poured the cold latte into a different cup and simply ditched the ice cubes. Surely there must be something in the Geneva Conventions about messing with a person’s morning caffeine fix. Where is Jackie Chiles when you need him?

So, disgusted but realizing I should have known better, I pointed my truck toward Starbucks. I paid a little more, but got exactly what I asked for with exactly the quality I was expecting.

The McLesson

Clearly, coffee is not Ronnie Mac’s forté. This was not my first failed attempt at getting a fancy coffee McDrink though I’ve tried on multiple occasions. Each and every time they have either botched it badly or been visibly irritated to have to break their burger making ritual in order to do obeisance at the latte machine. They pretty much bat 1.000 on the burgers though, because that’s what they’re really good at.

The lesson?  Stick to what you do well and let the rest to somebody else, because you can’t do everything well.  Not even if you have the deep pockets of Ronnie Mac.  Industry type doesn’t matter either, as history shows us that Novell made this same mistake in 1994 when they bought WordPerfect. They strayed away from what they did best at the time (file and print sharing), got into applications, and everything went downhill from there. Their slow descent into mediocrity is well chronicled, but it all started when they took their eyes off of what they were really good at. Tragically, they are not alone.

R.I.P. Wordperfect.  We knew thee well.

McApplication

There are only so many things you or your business can do with excellence – probably less than four – and usually only one in which you can truly excel. If, like the vast majority of businesses today, yours is a consumer of IT infrastructure rather than a provider, it will quite naturally be difficult and more expensive for you to try to deliver IT as effectively as a professional provider can. There is simply too much to know. It may even be a major annoyance like the McLatte machine. Why? Because it’s not your sweet spot. Your strengths will suffer while you’re focusing on things best delegated to others.

Servers, storage, networking infrastructure continue to evolve into increasingly more complex creatures. Unless IT is the sweet spot of your business, it doesn’t make sense to try to keep chasing infrastructure on your own, for much the same reasons you don’t keep factory-trained mechanics on staff to fix company cars. It’s too much, too costly and certainly not worth it.  IT is no different.  You absolutely need to have technology in your business, but there is no reason to bear the burden of it yourself.

Like Starbucks, professional IT providers may cost a fistful of dollars or just a few dollars more, but the results are reliable, predictable, and therefore very much worth it because it frees you to focus on what you do best.  Just make sure your IT provider doesn’t start selling coffee.

Why the movie references to Fistful of Dollars and A Few Dollars More? Well it turns out that Clint Eastwood’s most famous line came after a bad cup of Joe. If gun violence offends you, please don’t go here, otherwise…take a three minute action coffee break with Dirty Harry.

//spk

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