A Technical Manager's Perspective

IT Utopia

One of the challenges for any organization is balancing their technology spending against the bottom line. Year after year many IT organizations are limited to a 10 to 15 percent increase in IT spending over the previous years run rate, which really restricts new projects and growth in new technologies. This strategy, although good for the bottom line in the short run, is not a good strategy for the long run. IT organizations end up supporting older networks, older applications and older technologies for longer periods which eventually require large replacement projects to upgrade the older components, as opposed to consistent lower costing upgrade projects. As time goes on, the different IT departments compete with each other for new projects and eventually the oldest and most critical environments are replaced, usually consuming the entire 10 to 15 % increase in the budget, leaving limited funds for real infrastructure upgrades.

In my opinion, one requirement of IT Organizations in to deliver Best of Breed applications to the Business Community. IT groups can always identify the Best in Breed products and practices, however full adoption is usually cost prohibited, leaving IT organizations with partial adoption and holes in support, which results in an increase in process and headcount within the IT Organization.

From an IT perspective, complete lights out automation of every process would be Utopia. Adopting Best of Breed products and strategies could get us closer to the Utopia, however I am sure that we will never see this Utopia in my lifetime.

Technorati : Infrastructure, Management

Blogging Podcasting and VideoCasting

Blogging, Podcasting, and VideoCasting are certainly new forms of expression and communication that many folks participate in. Many folks understand the value associated with this form of communication, however, my sense is that many in Corporate America do not understand this value.

Most folks that know me know that I blog and listen to Podcast's, some folks read my blog, some make light of it and in some circles I get a sense that some folks think that this is a waste of time and a little adolescent. My thought is that most of the folks that think that Blogging or Podcasts are a waste of time, have not read my blog or any blog and have not listened to a podcast. If they have, the blog or podcast was on a subject that does not interests them.

Reading blogs or listening to Podcasts is just another form of consuming content, like reading the newspaper, or listening to radio. What is better about both is the fact that you can filter out the content that you do not want, and have the content that you prefer delivered to your browser or your mp3 player every day. Most of us in the blogosphere know and understand this, and recently, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania published a report on the state of blogging with comments from many called "To Blog or Not to Blog". The Wharton School reports that

"About 57 million American adults -- or 39% of Internet users -- read individually authored web logs, or "blogs," according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which does surveys to track Internet use. About 12 million American adults, or 8% of Internet users, keep a blog. They do so for a number of reasons -- to share professional or personal ideas and opinions, crack jokes, air political views, or comment on current events."

To read more about "To Blog or not to Blog" Follow this Link ....

57 Million American adults reading blogs, 12 million American adults publishing blogs, and that is only in America. Thats an awful lot of content and an awful lot of people. I bet even the most skeptical folks could find something that they like if they took the time to look.

So, why do I blog ?

I enjoy writing and sharing my opinions and professional experiences with others. With 57 million Americans reading blogs, I bet someone will read this.

Technorati : Blog, Podcast

Quick Update

I have fallen behind on my posts and podcast as too many conflicting priorities from both work and home have impacted my schedule.

A lot has happened in the last 2 weeks, Microsoft released Internet Explorer v7.0, it looks like Vista is on schedule and for anyone looking to explore the Virtualization space VMWORLD 2006 is scheduled for the first week in November.

It appears that that the conference market is starting to gain some traction. VMWORLD, VOIP, 3G Consumer Electronics are just a few of the many conferences scheduled over the next few months. This infers that companies are willing to send employees to conferences in the hope of gaining some payback from the conference. Personally, I question how much value is gained from attending conferences. I do see conferences as a nice perk that could with strategy and forward looking thinking, however there is rarely a ROI on the investment, especially if travel is involved.

Technorati : virtualization

Recovery of Damaged DVD

We have an older Pioneer DVD JukeBox that stores over 200 DVD's. This device was installed over 5 years ago and all of the folks involved in the installation have left our group. It was fairly dormant for the first 2 or 3 years however about 2 years ago we started using it as an archive repository. We use Point Software to virtually bind a number of DVD's together which then appear as a Share for folks and applications to use.

Over the last 6 months we have had a number of hardware related issues with the Jukebox. Internal switches would fail causing problems, shares would fail to mount and most recently two DVD drives had to be replaced. With this most recent failure we also realized that the bad DVD drive, damaged one of the DVD's in the share. There were 40 DVD's in the share and it would not mount because one of the DVD's was damaged. You could actually see the damage on one side of the DVD so we pulled the damaged DVD and worked through remounting the share with only 39 DVD's.

We tried to read the damaged DVD on multiple DVD readers however we could not read the DVD. We realized that we did not have a backup copy of the DVD, breaking Kevin's Rule Number 1 for all System Administrators, Backups are a Requirement. After further investigating, the original thought was that we backed up the data before archiving, so we would not need to backup or copy the archived data on the DVD server. However, with data spread across 40 drives, it was hard to determine which data was missing and a further complication was the fact that most of the data was from 2003 and we had selective backups from 2003 that probably would not work.

We were in trouble and Directors and VP's were looking for answers. I Goggled "Data Recovery" and identified thousands of companies that claimed they could restore your data. I called 4 different vendors and chose one close to work. I had a pay a premium to escalate our recovery however the vendor turned the restoration around in 2 days and recovered all of the data on the DVD. This allowed us to move the data back to the archive share however stressed the need for a backup or copy of our Archived DVD data.

Once the crisis died down, my team investigated how to copy a DVD within the Jukebox, and has started the process to make a duplicate DVD copy for all Archived DVD's in the Jukebox.

Though-out this process, all I could think about was RULE Number 1:

Backups are a Requirement and are Crucial to your success

Technorati : System Administration

Administrator Task List

You may have read my post from June on System and Network Administrators Tasks along with my little update to that post in July. If you happen to miss that post, I identified the tasks that I feel every System and Network Administrator need to understand to become better administrators. I am republishing this list, as I would like to touch base on a couple of topics related to this list over my next few posts.

1. Backups are a requirement and are crucial to your success
2. Monitoring Tools
3. Maintain Service Contracts with all vendors
4. Maintain Version Control
5. Consistent Hardware Builds and Software Installations
6. Documentation
7. Communication
8. Teamwork
9. Training and Schooling
10. Stay Current with Technology
11 Know your users or your customers
12 Know your line of business

Technorati : System Administration

Virtualization Cost Savings

In the "In the Trenches" blog this week, Kevin Devin asked the question "How much would one save if they rolled out Virtualization on a Windows 2003 Datacenter Server?" Kevin references James O'Neill's blog on the subject and asks if there would be a savings or not.

I think there would be a savings on all licensing cost associated with the Microsoft based Virtual Servers that will be running on the Windows 2003 Datacenter server. There would also be a cost savings if you choose Microsoft Virtual Server over VMWARE ESX Server. In my opinion, VMWARE's ESX server is more mature and more stable than Microsoft Virtual Server, however it is expensive. Microsoft realizes this and is trying to buy market share by forgoing their licensing costs on servers running Windows 2003 Datacenter.

VMWARE is in the lead now, however Microsoft has shown us that they do a good job of playing catch-up, so if they can stabilize the Microsoft Virtual Server product and continue to forgo Microsoft Licensing cost, then this could be an attractive option.

Technorati : Microsoft, virtualization, vmware

Microsoft Patches on Tuesday

Microsoft will release another 11 Patches on Tuesday October 10, 2006. 10 of the patches will be Critical Patches, 6 patches are Microsoft Windows patches and 4 patches are Microsoft Office patches. The last patch is for .NET and is rated as a moderate security risk.

More information can be found at the Microsoft Security Response Center

Technorati : Microsoft, Patches

What is a Technical Manager

Technical Manager’s as the name implies are individuals that have technical experience. So, what is technical experience? For some folks it’s as simple as working on a computer or working within a Information Systems group, however these days there are a lot of Business folks that work on or with computers, so the technical experience line is kind of grey. There are many technical roles in business today, starting with the computer operators and going all the way to the CIO.

In business today, there are many folks that understand the technical theory and there are folks that struggle with the technical theory. There are many instances of graduates that majored in Business and ended up in the Technology field. Some folks just fall into the Technical field, where other folks go to school for it.

Most Technical Manager’s that I know, started their careers working in a non-managerial technical role, and grew into a managerial role. This process usually starts with the technical individual contributor excelling within their technical responsibilities, sharing ideas around improvement, and leading large technical tasks and projects.

The role of Technical Manager is often different than that of a Technical Individual contributor and is more closely aligned with that of a Business Manager than a Technical Individual Contributor. Clearly the Technical Manager needs to understand the technology, and the impact of technology on the business, however the Technical Manager has many of the some responsibilities as the Business Manager. Both the Technical Manager and the Business Manager need to be good communicators and team builders. From a corporate perspective their roles are very similar; they both manage teams for the benefit of the organization.

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Technorati Tags: Technology, Manager, Management