Data Center & IT Infrastructure

Posted on 03 Jun 2010 by Ray Heffer

This is bit of a random post, but I wanted to share some of the reasons I joined IT in the first place. Lets face it, IT infrastructure hardware has evolved very well in the past 10 years. Pictured to the left is the HP c7000 blade chassis, and this was actually taken in March 2010 when I was rolling out VMware vSphere on HP BL460 G6 blades.

What I like about the BL460 G6 is that it can run 6 x NIC’s (two on board and a four port card) in addition to an HBA mezzanine card. Top that off with excellent BladeSystem management, ILO and Insight Manager, you can’t get much better. These blades here have 48GB RAM per host and two quad-core Intel x5550 processors. At half-height you can pack 16 of these in a single chassis. Excellent for consolidation, both in physical terms and virtual! I’ve been working within large data centres since 2004, prior to that I had only worked in what I call ‘server rooms’. As an infrastructure manager / technical specialist, I pride myself in delivering first class technical solutions which I typically sum up in the following value statement:

Providing a solid - reliable IT infrastructure, to meet the existing and future needs of the business, incorporating expert design, solutions and a truly professional level of service.

It’s not all about flashy hardware though, as the statement above suggest it is about the service provided to your organisation. It’s probably easy for me to say, as I have worked over the past years introducing virtualisaton, VDI, storage and other infrastructure technologies, which in turn gives you a personal sense of pride. Your success is ultimately measured by the service provided, which not only incorporates uptime (HA and DR) but quality of service, speedy performance and uninterrupted service even during maintenance windows.

If you are interested in the uptime of data centre’s then you can find out more by visiting the Uptime Institute or by reading up on tier 1 data centre’s (according to TIA-942) thatl adopt N+1 resilience with cooling and power, and secure access control which meets strict security requirements.

Keep your data centre tidy, and feel free to comment or share your own pics!

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