Proprietary, the Warlord, and the Siloman

I wish I could figure out people the way I can figure out technology.

Good technology grabs me. I see its underlying beauty. I see its strategic potential. I love the smell of servers in the morning.  I like the challenge of troubleshooting technology and making it work—the way I restored my ’67 Mustang and made it purr.

And what’s the reward for talent like this?  In a seven-year IT career, I’ve been promoted fast and often enough that I now have a fairly large staff that figures out technology—and I get to figure out my staff.

Take “Siloman”, for instance. He’s a storage admin who came along with our latest acquisition and oversees the proprietary storage boxes we also “inherited”. He’s all over their virtues. He sits down at their command line storage management tools like a pianist in the spotlight. THE go-to guy. It’s a big investment to learn the scripting, so no one wants to follow his act. And we’re paying a fair-size maintenance contract for the boxes. 

As I look across the enterprise, he’s just the latest—not the only—of our “Silomen”.

This is the second major acquisition of our year, and it won’t be the last.  I am presiding over what feels like an enterprise-wide flea market of near end-of-life equipment. My core players are working fast and furiously to keep us one step ahead of chaos.  Proprietary is us. 

Meanwhile, our CEO, the “Warlord”, has his eyes on his next conquest. He carries himself as if he’s just stepped off of the feudal fields of Japan, preparing to send his minions to do battle with the next infrastructure, furthering his destiny of becoming Shogun in our industry. Our shareholders just eat this guy up.  They know nothing of what it’s like to try and patch the infrastructures thrown together in his wake, or make a unified team from disparate IT groups, each invested in their platforms and vendors.

I need to appease Eris, the Greek goddess of strife, and bring some tranquility to all of this chaos.  I need a full picture of what’s out there.  And behind the scenes, I need to demolish all of my “whacky-dacky” silos. 

Later…

Hey Eugene, here’s how to get a complete picture everything you have out there, followed with a demolition plan that will help you rid yourself of all your data center silos.

Let’s start with your servers. Veritas Server Foundation from Symantec improves visibility—with application-aware information and alerts about events and conditions across the data center. It shows all running applications at the business service or application level, regardless of the infrastructure on which they run. And its control spans your data center. Advanced management features include pooling servers and decoupling applications, smart failover of crashing applications to servers with available capacity, and automated distribution of patches and updates.

Symantec can also help you streamline your systemmanagement. Altiris Total Management Suite dramatically reduces the costs of owning, operating, securing and supporting desktops, notebooks, servers and handheld devices by automating management tasks throughout their lifecycles. The suite is a heterogeneous, integrated management solution designed to help your organization centrally and more efficiently address business issues such as security, compliance, unnecessary costs, and IT change management.

To get rid of your storage silos, the first step is to get visibility and control across multiple storage platforms and arrays from a single console. You can do that with Veritas CommandCentral Storage from Symantec. It provides capacity management, centralized monitoring, application to spindle mapping, and active management of storage components. It will help you answer these questions: What data do you have? Where is it located? How is it being used? And is it in the right place?

Guided by this overview of storage, Veritas Storage Foundation is the tool you need to efficiently make storage changes dynamically, without any modifications required by end users. Asia’s most profitable bank revealshow this is done.