DataCenter

Feeding IT - you should never let it starve

Feeding IT 

I was talking to someone just the other day who works for a large company with a nice set of offerings for sale and a hearty market, short for they have money to spend, but the “C” level people in the company still see IT as a bottomless pit of money. Something they could soon live without and this is not a new conversation. I have heard this many times that if the money hungry IT was removed from the company we could be more profitable. This is like saying if I could get the heavy engine out of my nice shinny Porsche 911  then this car would be much faster without all that dead weight in the rear of it. A-hem, I apologize for interrupting your conversation about the “dead weight” and the “Porsche” but that heavy thing in the back is the heart and soul of the car, the engine kind sir, you might wan to keep it around unless you needed a garden planter? Most companies today still see IT as the dead weight in the back of a car and would rather ignore it and starve it only to find out later it needs a little maintenance and money to fix it up from time to time. Without IT companies fail to operate. That’s right I said it if you pull the plug on the server and fire the IT staff your fine company with all it’s nice things to sell will grind to a halt.

Planning for the perfect data center - It’s not possible

The Data Center

I have been in big IT for over 18 years. I have seen data centers grow from back rooms and basements to multi-million dollar facilities with fences, security, and other features. With all this planning there is still something that can go wrong and lately I have been thinking about what the perfect data center would look like. What would perfection cost and is it obtainable? Certainly not most would add and like anything in life it’s impossible to predict everything that could cause you pain in a well planned out data center. I say a hosting company today that is selling server hosting and web hosting and the office is located in down town San Francisco. I am not making this up. They have a nice 5 story building in the heart of downtown and while I am sure they have done everything to keep it from rumbling to the ground I would not have placed a high up time, mission critical data center in the heart of Earth Quake country. It’s not a selling point to me when I am looking for server co-location.

Where is the perfect place to put a data center? That is of course the question that most CIOs are looking at today and no one had the “perfect” answer.

An abandoned oil rig off the cost of the UK? No I would guess not, hard to commute to work daily.

Just outside a large city? Well maybe but which large city and how far out?

If you look at the earth you have to pick a place that is close to your customers or close to large amounts of cheap bandwidth so that you can be close via a ping rather the proximity. That is not an easy bill to fill right now as most place with load of pipe are also close to major cities and no one wants to be in down town anywhere the next time something bad like 9/11 happens.  You don’t want it down South near the Gulf of Mexico or Florida since there are hurricanes. You don’t want it in California, Oregon or Washington there are earthquakes. You don’t want it in the North East the salaries are to high and everything is so close together that your risk of anything happening goes way up. The south west? Nope the cooling cost are much higher and if the power goes out you need tons of on site electricity and that gets very expensive. What about the Mid-West? Tornadoes and hard to attract good technical talent. So where is the perfect place to put a data center?

Even if you did find a good place for a data center how would you build the building? I might place it underground so that it would be safer, but then you have to think about flooding in the case of heavy rain, so the list goes on and on and in the end you are stuck with a truck full of servers, switches and racks that can’t be located anywhere. Then you think maybe that is the answer, we put it all in an 18 wheeler and drive it to the safest place in the country at the time and never stop rolling…while it sounds like fun it would be a logistical nightmare.

There is no perfect data center and if there was everyone would want to be in it and no on would place on in the heart of down town San Francisco ever, not even on a bad day and think that was a good idea.

System i Data Center Wish List

With Christmas fast approaching and I am still figuring out what I would like to have under the tree from Santa, I ran across an article that said what Enterprise Classed IT types were wanting for their data centers this year. I know if I had an unlimited budget, and don’t we all, I would want System i  Power6 and lots of it, V6R1, Lotus 8, Lotus Symphony to be GA and replace MS Office,Linux on System i to replace those costly Windows File Server and Print Servers, and the fastest robotic tape backup system money could buy, of course LTO4 would be in order. So past the things you might like if you could take the money out of the companies bank account or if money were not object. and read the Article I found and enjoyed reading.

LINK

Hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and a Very Happy New Year, I will be moving myself and my family next week, the day after Christmas from Colorado to Charlotte, NC and will be rather busy. I have some posts lined up and will make sure you have something to read and enjoy!

System i Salaries - Are they fair?

I have been a System i Admin for over 18 years. I have enjoyed every minute of it, but over the years I have seen something that does not make sense to me or other Admins in my shoes. The salaries have leveled off and are not going up at the same rate they were 20 years ago. While I am not poor or broke, I do think that System i admins are special people and due to the fact we are special we deserve a little better pay than most regular Admins.

While the System i is an easy system to work on they are usually in large IT shops and have lots of users needing lots of things from it, plus the bulk of the companies data lives on that box and it’s essential for the company to function day to day. While some servers in IT can be down the System i can’t.

So where does this leave us. While I am not going to looking up numbers and facts I can give you what I have in my head, life experiences. If I did put numbers and facts up I think this would be a News site and it really is just a blog, a place for me to think aloud and you to ponder.

I know live in Denver and when I moved here (Denver) from Atlanta my salary went down, but my cost of living went up. This is but one of my problems while in Denver. Before I moved to Denver I lived in Atlanta and my average System i pay was about $77K a year USD. Not bad. I did better some years but I would say that is still about the average in Atlanta. I am looking on job boards and it seems to be right in the middle.

Denver on the other hand is a bit worse. While I needed more money to live here I was not able to make as much money as I had in Atlanta. I would say based on my W2 and current job boards the average salary for Denver is $62K a year, still a decent amount of money but I am not sure how that works. How can I need less money to live in Atlanta and make more, yet in Denver where there is a shortage of System i Admin and a higher cost of living I can’t make enough to live like I had in Atlanta. If you take the cost of living into account in Denver I would have needed to make over $82K a year just to make the same as I had in Atlanta.

Word of caution to IT people thinking about moving to Denver for “Great IT Jobs”, I would caution you. That is all I am saying. The jobs here in IT are few and far between. I am talking about average IT jobs, not specialties like the System i or Lotus Notes. The bigger problem is people get desperate here and since there are few jobs in IT they take what they can get and the employers know that. They commonly scalp JAVA and C++ talent because they have been let go and now need a job bad. I would think twice before moving to Denver for an IT job, it may seem like the greatest job on earth but if you get let go you will end up working for whatever they will pay and it’s usually not good.

I see this problem in other markets as well. I have talked to people like me all over and the same stories are abound. System i Admins all make less than say an UNIX Admin or a Linux Admin when in fact our servers are just as important to the companies that run the System i as the companies that focus their IT infrastructure to UNIX based systems.

Are we being shorted? Does no one see our value? I am not sure…I have alwasy considered that IT people needed to form Unions, while I am no fan of Unions as they work today I think overall companies don’t pay IT people what they are worth. Most companies see IT people as overhead and not necessary and I have been told that before and pretty recently too. IT is an expense we have to incur in order to run. While I don’t agree with either of those statements and I have left those companies, I do think many places feel like that. They don’t see the true value of IT, and maybe it’s because we sit in a chair all day and don’t do any hard labor like lifting stones or digging ditches? Some places that are pure IT shops understand that if they don’t take care of the people they lose them over time to other places. Google.com is one of the places that is really a pure IT company. Everyone there is a computer person for the most part. Google takes care of it’s assets which are it’s talent. Every company in my opinion should take a long hard look at the Google model and adopt what they can in order to retain and motivate their employees.

While I don’t think we can strike for the obvious reasons, I do think we owe it to ourselves to up the anti a bit. Next time you are interviewing for a position and they low ball you because they think you will work there and are desperate please counter offer until they give you what you deserve. IT people and System i people are important. Find out what you are worth and add 5% just for good measure. If was all demand more for our skills we will over time increase the salaries of all other System i people around. It’s time to at least make as much money as the UNIX Admins out there pulling down over $120K a year while we provide the same quality of service on a cheaper server.

I would like to point out I am very happy with my current position and being compensated fairly.