4. Change Management – It’s the process of
making changes in environment with methods or procedure with lowest possible
impacts on business. Every change requires preparation, planning, simulation
for expected results and verification. As it involves business, every change
requires approval from stake-holders too
a. Why: To minimize the unplanned downtimes
b. Challenges: executing
movement/addition/changes without impacting availability or business, maintaining
compatibility within eco-system of IT Infrastructure including spares while
implementing upgrades or changes
c. Solution:
i.
A plan which explains the work-flow for the
changes to be performed
ii.
A proper change management, with business
approved downtimes to perform change and to avoid business impacts like
off-hours or weekends. A redundant infra or resources would be required to
perform change without downtime, which adds to CAPEX and OPEX both
iii.
HCL or Hardware Compatibility Lists should be
referred along with Inter-portability matrix to verify compatibility of
components with other components post upgrade e.g. Storage firmware level of
Brocade or Cisco SAN switch with Host HBA card or Storage Controller card
should be verified before performing firmware upgrade. There would be a
separate article to give you some over-view on Change Tech Plans in DataCenter.
iv.
It is a best practice to maintain even with
firmware level when upgrading infrastructure.
v.
Some examples of Changes required in a
datacenter can be relocating the server, patch-panel re-wiring, firmware or
software upgrades, addition of resources or components, replacement of faulty
components etc. Configuration changes are also considered under change
management.
Putting Pieces Together: Most of
the Business organization takes the following initiative as their strategy to
meet above
·
Implementation of Incident Management process
·
Defining and Measure Availability Targets
·
Monitor and Plan future Road-Maps for Long Term
Capacity Plan
·
Implementation of Change Management process
Special Note:
·
It may be difficult to find single tool to
manage complete or all layer of equipment in your datacenter i.e. rack space,
power/cooling, server, storage, network and application. Usually Datacenter are
hybrid and have multi-vendor solution. Integration or coordination between
solutions by these vendors may be difficult.
·
20% Improvement during Designing Phase can
remove 80% of the problems which may be caused by them in future, now this
statement doesn’t cover only the DataCenter but the process or methods and
procedures as well.
·
As observed, there may be overlap of
responsibility between different departments like facility and IT, which may
cause conflicts. Management decisions would be required for defining roles in
such scenarios. It’s the technology, process and people, which together keeps
the business up and running
·
Even though Physical Infra or Enterprise
Management systems (EMS) sounds similar to Building Management system (BMS) due
to components being managed or monitored under them i.e. space/power/cooling,
but the focus of both are different. Physical Infra focus on availability of
business, while BMS focus on comfort and safety. Integration of both EMS and
BMS could be very costly.
Any more questions? please write back or comment here. There are more things to share..
Request you to join my group on Facebook & LinkedIN with name "DataCenterPro" to get regular updates. I am also available on Tweeter as @_anubhavjain. Shortly I am going to launch my own YouTube channel for free training videos on different technologies as well.
Happy Learning!!
Request you to join my group on Facebook & LinkedIN with name "DataCenterPro" to get regular updates. I am also available on Tweeter as @_anubhavjain. Shortly I am going to launch my own YouTube channel for free training videos on different technologies as well.
Happy Learning!!
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