Data Center Implementation and build

I was bit fortunate when I participated in a presentation on DC Implementation and build.
After the presentation, I was very much excited about the content & knowledge of the presentation which is not available freely & easily over the internet. Thus I decided to put the content here with some of the my understanding. Most of the IT managers look for the deep secretes of building a DATA CENTER, following are the points which are very much important in terms of the building a Data Center.
1st, How many types of Data Centers?        So, there are 4 types of Data Centers (Tier 1–4, details are easily available over the internet). Tier 1 to 4 Data Center is nothing but a standardize methodology used to define uptime of DC. Primarily these are useful for measuring: DC performance, Investment, and ROI.
Tier 4 Data Center is considered to be most robust and less prone to failures (Downtimes). A Data Center is nothing but a(Power + Cooling + Place) where we keep different networked devices. While constructing a data center we should see that, it is scalable, modular, flexible & simple in design.
Which are most important element/s of the any Data Center?    Following are the most important elements during planning & designing for a new Data Center which will direct the course of action....
A. Stakeholders
B. Scope
C. Space
D. Cost
E. Requirement (individual)
F Compliance
What are the precautions we should follow while building a Data Center?        While building a new DC, there are many things which are of lot of importance, we should follow below design guidelines during the course....
A. Label everything (golden rule)
B. Use RLU (rack location unit) costing
C. Be flexible, for future needs
D. Think modular, for future expand plan
E. Worry about weight, as we are aware that most of the DC does not build on ground floor, so we should think properly for weight of the devices.
F. Keep things covered or bundled to avoid dusting
G. Build raised floor tiles at least of 4 feet
Lets look at Data Center build from the perspective of project management (PMI). Once I was a part of the team where we were involved in planning & designing phase of the DC build project. There are many major areas in any Data Center build project, i.e. Civil work, Electrical work, Fire work, Security & Cooling arrangement. I learned most of the stuff in that project only, following are the some golden learning's....
a. A complete Scope, an approved budget, & an experience team (are the keys to build DC successfully)
b. Insurance and local/ state /country building codes
c. Determining the viability of the project
d. Realistic project & full budget
e. Considerable redundancies of power/services/HVAC/UPS
f. Proper management of account (how will be funds distributed)
g. Future modifications, upgrades, changes
h. Factors in running cost, services, and maintenance contract with supplier
i. Are redundant system really necessary
j. How much will be projected failures (downtimes)
k. Separate NOC/command center
l. What is the best time to bring the facility online (schedule management)
m. Physical space and weight capacity for equipment/device
n. Power availability/grid power
o. Cooling system redundancy to increase uptime
p. ISP Bandwidth type & amount
And for above we should have fantastic Support, processes which are....
A. Location of floor & weight of rack
B. Sufficient power to run racks
C. Humidity in Data Center should be between 40-45% & cooling should be between 18–27c
Ok, its not all, we have something bigger to worry. Lets talk about risk in these types of projects. Till now I have identified following major risks....
A. Ambiguity in the scope of work
B. Not having clear contract/sourcing process
C. Queries from vendor, turns out to be additional work
D. Change management
E. Finance
F. No involvement of delivery team/people during planning or design phase
That's all I have, will be posting more in this topic if I learned/discover new things in this regards.

How to minimize server consolidation mistakes!

It's all too easy for even a knowledgeable and experienced IT veteran to make mistakes while managing a complex server-consolidation project. You have to think about everything, It can be a minefield.
Server virtualization projects are usually easy to justify on both financial and operational grounds, but that doesn't make them foolproof to execute. Pitfalls, such as inadequate planning, faulty assumptions or failure to quickly detect post deployment glitches, can entrap consolidation project leaders and team members at almost every stage. Every time or most of the time we felt that we covered every base, that every single thing had been looked at.... that's when the danger started.
Avoiding disaster while keeping a complicated consolidation project on schedule and within budget isn't easy. In fact a few mistakes along the way is inevitable. It will go wrong: Be prepared. On the other hand, planning and learning from others will keep you away from making the big and obvious mistakes.
Plan for success - While even the most thorough, painstaking planning can't completely eliminate project mistakes, building a detailed virtualization design and deployment strategy will help minimize the number of errors. Planning is really key for server consolidation.
Thorough planning creates a road map that helps managers gather the knowledge required to avoid most major problems. I think people aren't spending enough time thinking about the issues of the existing workloads and how you migrate those into a virtual environment, and what does that mean in terms of cost structure, ongoing expense and high availability.consolidation planning also needs to address an organization's future needs. Look at what you're going to do in a year, 3 years and 5 years from today. Servers, software and other system elements need to be planned with an eye toward anticipated growth. You don't want to get yourself in a situation where you do this whole big upgrade and then you find you need more server capacity later on.
I also agree that every consolidation plan needs to address scalability issue. From the standpoint of server virtualization, it's very important to have a system that scales and meets the performance need of the load you're putting on it. We often come to know about many organizations that either didn't allocate enough storage, or simply didn't correctly anticipate the amount of server power that was going to be needed to facilitate their server consolidation project.
It's extremely common to overestimate the physical-to-virtual consolidation ratio: Experts Advise (As per KBC)

Your biggest Risk is Poor Project Management!

One of our most highly sought after single discipline classes within project management is risk management. Top management is hot on it; they feel their Project Managers are weak in risk management because of a common pattern they witness. Projects are not being completed as expected and the main culprit it seems is unexpected events, unforeseen risks, which plague these projects. Top management believe that if PM’s receive training in risk management they will be more able to foresee these events and avoid them. What top management do not fully know is that these unforeseen events are not due to poor risk management skills but poor fundamental project management skills. This is what happens behind the scenes on a miss managed project: The project manager gets surprised when he becomes aware that his project’s schedule or quality of the deliverable is missing the mark. In an effort to draw attention away from himself, the PM creates a story based on events that could not have been seen and therefore mitigated. These stories are not total fiction, they often contain a good portion of fact but are told in a manner that supports the project manager’s position that he was the victim of these unforeseen events. What probably happened is the PM did not have a handle on the details of what the project’s current state was. He also did not pay attention to the future work that might be impacted by the current reality. As a result, the current reality was vague and its impact on the future was even more so. In this situation everything becomes a surprise. Symptoms of poor project management display themselves in several specific ways. Here are a few:

• Not breaking down the deliverables into a detailed set of tasks
• Not identifying the dependencies between tasks
• Not knowing what tasks have been fully completed
• Not knowing how much more remains to be completed on incomplete tasks
• Not curtailing scope expansion based on the project’s scope statement
• Not adjusting future estimates based on estimating error trends
• Not adjusting future work based on current reality and its impact on project completion
• Not tracking external dependencies
• Not knowing if the promised availability of partial resources is being met

If we apply the risk management process to the risk above it would go like this: Risk identification tells us poor project management is a potential risk, risk assessment tells us the potential impact is extremely high, and the risk mitigation plan is to ensure PM’s practice good project management fundamentals. This is easier said than done, but still very doable. Five actions must be implemented to ensure PM’s practice good project management fundamentals:

1. Project managers must receive training in the fundamentals. The training must cover project planning, execution and control, and it must be sufficiently thorough to give them the practical understanding of the concepts.
2. There must be a standard methodology that project managers can follow. It must be appropriately balanced between planning, execution, and control, and it must be detailed enough to give them a routine to follow that will help overcome the practices of poor project management defined above.
3. Project managers must have access to software tools that enable them to easily follow the training and methodology provided.
4. Project managers must deliver management reports on a routine basis that are metric driven and allow management to verify that good project management practices are being followed as well as an accurate status of the project.
5. Management must support the practice of project management. This is much more involved than you think. It means acquiring a working knowledge of project management fundamentals so you can talk the PM’s language. It also means giving PM’s the time to do their job right and not asking them to take a short cut or disregard portions of the methodology.

The reason is that the five actions above were instituted within the PM’s organizations and were sustained. Next time a PM plays the victim and blames unforeseen risks audit him. You will learn that most likely it isn’t unforeseen risk that hurt his project; it is poor project risk management.

DATA MIGRATION OUTLOOK

This is more or less related with DC migration, however it mainly concentrate on Data migration. It came with some more clear understanding about this activity of the lifetime. Following are the 1st requirement in this term. 1.    Clear Definition of requirement for all data
2.    Funding constraints
3.    Required expertise in heterogeneous storage  / Server H/W / Network environment / cooling / HVAC
4.    Detail security & availability requirements
5.    Define migration requirement -- which determines success criteria - includes, SLA, expectation for new storage infrastructure, and objective such as reduced management cost, reduced storage expenditure, greater insight info expenditure, a simplified vendor model or greater technical flexibility or stability The prospect of data migration can be overwhelming. Some of the common conditions we find among our clients are familiar to many IT leaders:

• Lack of clear definition of requirements for all data. Data rules should focus on security, availability and recoverability. It's easy to imagine that documents with temporary data and permanent data could be confusing, making it difficult to determine which data is important and which isn't.
• Distributed islands of data. Often, a business unit will implement a new application and request that the infrastructure for it remain close at hand.
• Funding constraints. Tight budgets may limit technology decisions and options.
• Lack of expertise in heterogeneous storage environments. With each vendor's support limited to its own products, incompatibility between storage technologies becomes the problem of the IT manager.

Data migration has much in common with storage consolidation. However, storage consolidation tends to be a better-organized project because it's usually backed by executive sponsorship with specific goals for cost reduction. Data migration, on the other hand, tends to be departmental in scope and limited to tactical objectives, which minimize project size and potential returns. We should focus on the similarities between storage consolidation and data migration, to ensure that the work that's done has strategic value.

1. Detail security and availability requirements. Sometimes called data classification, this requires the security and infrastructure teams to jointly identify the needs of the IT environment. Data classification describes conditions for data access, retention requirements and security measures such as encryption. Even a very limited set of classifications will have tremendous benefit.
2. Define migration requirements -- which determine success criteria. These may include new service-level agreements, expectations for the new storage infrastructure, and objectives such as reduced management costs, reduced storage expenditures, greater insight into expenditure, a more simple vendor model or greater technical flexibility or stability.
3. Survey the IT environment. IT departments often use tools and scripts to do this. But migration requires a complete understanding of infrastructure technology involved, including the networks and file servers. The location of data is just as important: Without providing sufficient bandwidth capacity to support heavy network access, relocating data to a centralized repository could have wrong effects. A internal survey could provide the following:
   • The location of the data, its capacity and growth requirements.
   • Data usage as a measurement of the I/O load.
   • Data criticality rating, which can reveal potential effect on network load and influence retention and availability requirements.
   • Data classification. IT managers can decide what data requires the most expensive storage and stringent protection and what could be restored easily from an archive (backup). They can then make well-informed, strategic decisions about future systems.
   • Management costs for the current environment. This often-overlooked step offers the best opportunity to define benefits of migration.
4. Design the appropriate consolidation or replacement platform, including technology, management and backup tools and procedures. Data classification and a good survey reduce the chance of an over engineered system and contribute to a platform design that will accommodate and boost growth, availability and performance.
5. As with any IT project, it's important to remember that communication is vital. The actual movement of data from Point A to Point B will affect the organization, and it's crucial to minimize downtime -- especially in situations where data could change even as databases are restored from tape.
   Ideally, standards for data should be defined and communicated in advance of the migration, and personnel are alerted to changes in the way they will access data. However, costs also need to be communicated so that business managers understand how noncompliance will affect the project.

Data Center Relocation Coordination

It is essential to have the IT equipment migration project team assembled and organized early in the design process. As construction drawings are completed and the construction begins, the team should be very hard at work with equipment planning and migration activities.

• Pre-design relocation project cost estimating.
• Identification and cataloging of all equipment within IT spaces.
• Production of project drawings, schedules, meeting documentation and other documentation for distribution to all teams.
• Team Participation in design and construction meetings. 
• Monitoring of the building construction schedule against planned events.
• Coordination of the installation of voice and data circuits from the carriers.
• Supervision of the physical relocation of all equipment.

That’s all from me. Take good care of your valuable data.

Data Center basics - Definition and Solutions

What is a data center?
Known as the server farm or the computer room, the data center is where the majority of an enterprise servers and storage are located, operated, maintained and managed. There are four primary components to a data center:
1. White space: This typically refers to the usable raised floor environment measured in square feet (anywhere from a few hundred to a hundred thousand square feet). For data centers that don't use a raised floor environment, the term "white space" may still be used to show usable square footage.
2. Support infrastructure: This refers to the additional space and equipment required to support data center operations — including power transformers, your UPS, generators, computer room air conditioners (CRACs), remote transmission units (RTUs), chillers, air distribution systems, etc. In a high-density, Tier 3 class data center (i.e. a concurrently maintainable facility), this support infrastructure can consume 4-6 times more space than the white space and must be accounted for in data center planning.
3. IT equipment: This includes the racks, cabling, servers, storage, management systems and network gear required to deliver computing services to the organization.
4. Operations: The operations staff assures that the systems (both IT and infrastructure) are properly operated, maintained, upgraded and repaired when necessary. In most companies, there is a division of responsibility between the Technical Operations group in IT and the staff responsible for the facilities support systems.
How are data centers managed?
Operating a data center at peak efficiency and reliability requires the combined efforts of facilities and IT.
IT systems: Servers, storage and network devices must be properly maintained and upgraded. This includes things like operating systems, security patches, applications and system resources (CPU, memory, and storage).
Facilities infrastructure: All the supporting systems in a data center face heavy loads and must be properly maintained to continue operating satisfactorily. These systems include cooling, humidification, air handling, power distribution, backup power generation and much more.
Monitoring: When a device, connection or application fails, it can takedown mission critical operations. Sometimes, one system's failure will lead to applications on other systems that rely on the data or services from the failed unit. A failure in one will compromise all the others. Additionally, modern applications typically have a high degree of device and connection interdependence. Ensuring maximum uptime requires 24/7 monitoring of the applications, systems and key connections involved in all of an enterprises various workflows.
Building Management System: For larger data centers, the building management system (BMS) will allow for constant and centralized monitoring of the facility, including temperature, humidity, power and cooling.
The management of IT and data center facilities are often outsourced to third party companies that specialize in the monitoring, maintenance and remediation of systems and facilities on a shared services basis.
What are some top concerns about data centers?
While the data center must provide the resources necessary for the end users and the enterprise's applications, the provisioning and operation of a data center is divided uncomfortably between IT, facilities and finance, each with its own unique perspective and responsibilities.
IT: It is the responsibility of the business's IT group to make decisions regarding what systems and applications are required to support the business' operations. IT will directly manage those aspects of the data center that relate directly to the IT systems while relying on facilities to provide for the data center's power, cooling, access and physical space.
Facilities: The facilities group is generally responsible for the physical space — for provisioning, operations and maintenance, along with other building assets owned by the company. The facilities group will generally have a good idea of overall data center efficiency and will have an understanding of and access to IT load information and total power consumption.
Finance: The finance group will be responsible for aligning near term vs. long term CAPEX to acquire or upgrade physical assets and OPEX to run them with overall corporate financial operations (balance sheet and cash flow).
Perhaps the biggest challenge confronting these three groups is that by its very nature a data center rarely will be operating at or even close to its optimally defined range. With a typical life cycle of 10 years or might longer, it is essential that the data center's design remains sufficiently flexible to support increasing power densities and various degrees of occupancy over a not insignificant period of time. This in-built flexibility should apply to power, cooling, space and network connectivity. When a facility is approaching its limits of power, cooling and space, the organization will be confronted by the need to optimize its existing facilities, expand them or establish new ones.
What are some data center measurements and benchmarks and where can I find them?
PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness): Created by members of the Green Grid, PUE is a metric used to determine a data center's energy efficiency. A data center's PUE is arrived at by dividing the amount of power entering it by the power used to run the computer infrastructure within it. Expressed as a ratio, with efficiency improving as the ratio approaches 1, data center PUE typically range from about 1.3 (good) to 3.0 (bad), with an average of 2.5 (not so good).
DCiE (Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency): Created by members of the Green Grid, DCiE is another metric used to determine the energy efficiency of a data center, and it is the reciprocal of PUE. It is expressed as a percentage and is calculated by dividing IT equipment power by total facility power. Efficiency improves as the DCiE approaches 100%. A data center's DCiE typically ranges from about 33% (bad) to 77% (good), with an average DCiE of 40% (not so good).
LEED Certified: Developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), LEED is an internationally recognized green building certification system. It provides third-party verification that a building or community was designed and built using strategies aimed at improving performance across all the metrics that matter most:- energy savings, water efficiency, CO2 emission reduction, the quality of the indoor environment, the stewardship of resources and the sensitivity to their impact on the general environment.
The Green Grid: A not-for-profit global consortium of companies, government agencies and educational institutions dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems. The Green Grid does not endorse vendor-specific products or solutions, and instead seeks to provide industry-wide recommendations on best practices, metrics and technologies that will improve overall data center energy efficiencies.
Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA): TIA is the leading trade association representing the global information and communications technology (ICT) industries. It helps develop standards, gives ICT a voice in government, provides market intelligence, certification and promotes business opportunities and world-wide environmental regulatory compliance. With support from its 600 members, TIA enhances the business environment for companies involved in telecommunications, broadband, mobile wireless, information technology, networks, cable, satellite, unified communications, emergency communications and the greening of technology. TIA is accredited by ANSI.
TIA-942: Published in 2005, the Telecommunications Infrastructure Standards for Data Centers was the first standard to specifically address data center infrastructure and was intended to be used by data center designers early in the building development process. TIA-942 covers:
• Site space and layout
• Cabling infrastructure
• Tiered reliability
• Environmental considerations
Tiered Reliability — The TIA-942 standard for tiered reliability has been adopted by ANSI based on its usefulness in evaluating the general redundancy and availability of a data center design.
Tier 1 Basic — no redundant components (N): 99.671% availability
• Susceptible to disruptions from planned and unplanned activity
• Single path for power and cooling
• Must be shut down completely to perform preventive maintenance
• Annual downtime of 28.8 hours
Tier 2 — Redundant Components (limited N+1): 99.741% availability
• Less susceptible to disruptions from planned and unplanned activity
• Single path for power and cooling includes redundant components (N+1)
• Includes raised floor, UPS and generator
• Annual downtime of 22.0 hours
Tier 3 — Concurrently Maintainable (N+1): 99.982% availability
• Enables planned activity (such as scheduled preventative maintenance) without disrupting computer hardware operation (unplanned events can still cause disruption)
• Multiple power and cooling paths (one active path), redundant components (N+1)
• Annual downtime of 1.6 hours
Tier 4 — Fault Tolerant (2N+1): 99.995% availability
• Planned activity will not disrupt critical operations and can sustain at least one worst-case unplanned event with no critical load impact
• Multiple active power and cooling paths
• Annual downtime of 0.4 hours
Due to the doubling of infrastructure (and space) over Tier 3 facilities, a Tier 4 facility will cost significantly more to build and operate. Consequently, many organizations prefer to operate at the more economical Tier 3 level as it strikes a reasonable balance between CAPEX, OPEX and availability.
Uptime Institute: This is a for profit organization formed to achieve consistency in the data center industry. The Uptime Institute provides education, publications, consulting, research, and stages conferences for the enterprise data center industry. The Uptime Institute is one example of a company that has adopted the TIA-942 tier rating standard as a framework for formal data center certification. However, it is important to remember that a data center does not need to be certified by the Uptime Institute in order to be compliant with TIA-942.
What should I consider when moving my data center?
When a facility can no longer be optimized to provide sufficient power and cooling — or it can't be modified to meet evolving space and reliability requirements — then you're going to have to move. Successful data center relocation requires careful end-to-end planning.
Site selection: A site suitability analysis should be conducted prior to leasing or building a new data center. There are many factors to consider when choosing a site. For example, the data center should be located far from anyplace where a natural disaster — floods, earthquakes and hurricanes — could occur. As part of risk mitigation, locations near major highways and aircraft flight corridors should be avoided. The site should be on high ground, and it should be protected. It should have multiple, fully diverse fiber connections to network service providers. There should be redundant, ample power for long term needs. The list can go on and on.
Moving: Substantial planning is required at both the old and the new facility before the actual data center relocation can begin. Rack planning, application dependency mapping, service provisioning, asset verification, transition plans, test plans and vendor coordination are just some of the factors that go into data center transition planning.
If you are moving several hundred servers, the relocation may be spread over many days. If this is the case, you will need to define logical move bundles so that interdependent applications and services can be moved together so that you will be able to stay in operation up to the day on which the move is completed.
On move day, everything must go like clockwork to avoid down time. Real time visibility into move execution through a war room or a web-based dashboard will allow you to monitor the progress of the move and be alerted to potential delays that require immediate action or remediation.

Data Center Migration Do's & Don'ts

For any and every organization, data center migration can be a bit tricky. But that's especially true for the do-it-yourselfers at small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs); they often don't have the resources to involve high-priced specialists. Instead they need to do the best with the resources they have.
The common challenge in all of the moves/ migration is unknown. "That's why it is so important to plan, plan, plan and then plan some more". In one of the "worst case," one of my friend Manu said the bankruptcy of a co-location facility forced an unplanned shift of one of his data centers within a matter of days (3 weeks). Thanks to good luck, he and his organization has immediately identified an alternate location, the move succeeded. However, he noted, "It took three months before things were really back to normal." Data Center migrations have been the result of more leisurely and thorough planning as well as the ability to prepare a whole new facility and then simply move the resources, to minimize the impact and reduce the possibility of outages.
As Manu suggested that first step should always has be to be clear your mind about your bandwidth needs and then talk to your ISP / network suppliers. "Moving network devices might take as little as a few weeks, but for higher capacity systems you might need three or four months of lead time," he said.
By the way, any one knows how a specialist work on the DC migration project. Ok, no guess needed,  I have prepared a Data center migration checklist which will help you to become a specialist in DC migration project. The list includes the following steps....
a. Review support contracts to make sure they will still be valid in the new location, after H/W migration
b. Determine who will do the physical shifting and reconfiguration: your own staff, a consultant. Collect & classify every bit of detail
c. Review service-level agreements (SLA) with outside customers (if any), particularly with regard to liability for any customer supplied or customer owned equipment
d. Document and label everything. If possible, consider simplifying your infrastructure well in advance of a move
e. Document every application/system interdependencies and plan the sequence of the move accordingly
f. If possible, set up a duplicate facility in the new location rather than moving and setting up the same equipment again
g. Be aware of and try to eliminate any single points of failure in both old and new locations
h. Develop and use redundancy. For example, a disaster recovery (DR) location where you can keep critical apps and provide failover
i. Consider moving to storage or server virtualization -- or both. one could set up a virtual platform including storage, virtualize the physical servers and move the virtual platform to the new location while keeping the physical setup at the old location until the virtual platform is up at the new location
j. Back up everything in preparation for the move. Hard drives are notorious for failing when they have been shut down, cooled, moved and restarted
k. You need to identify your most critical applications and have contingency plans in place, its just like preparing a disaster recovery and business continuity (BC) plan
As per my understanding, the planning process should be divided into two phases. The first phase is to determine what is wanted from the new data center or ensuring that a chosen location can meet certain requirements (i.e., space, power, security, other facilities, growth capacity and location). The second phase is to execute the move.
5 years ago I moved our two-racks worth of kit between floors in the same data center at VSNL Mumbai and it was too hard to get all the communications suppliers / colo server owners to turn up on the same Saturday to move everything at once.
Of course, migration aren't smooth, which begs the question of whether to do it yourself or hire someone else. As per my understanding, it depends on many factors. If you hire an outside consultant, be sure they have experience in this type of work and be sure you know how equipment will be transported and by whom.
For his part, Manu said hiring outside help may be a must if you have a small staff. However, he said, at a minimum, "You should make sure preparing for the move and coordinating it is the full-time responsibility of at least one person." Otherwise, you are looking at trouble. "Moving is a challenge but if you properly plan and prepare, it's manageable," he added.
For those embarking on a data center move, there are a few tools that may help. For example, data migration can be assisted by product such as....
a. Brocade's Data Migration Manager (DMM)
b. EMC Corp.'s Rainfinity (a NAS virtualization appliance that can be deployed for migrating data)
c. Hitachi Data Systems (Universal Replicator and open-source rsync). In addition
d. Shunra Software's Shunra VE, a tool that helps predict the impact of moving or reconfiguring a data center on application performance, backups and other aspects of operations.
That's all from me, all the very best for your endeavor to migrate Data Center

Do your intuitions come into play in your IT consulting work?

Got a interesting fact from one of my friend from Bangalore. It goes like this....
During a Trivial Pursuit game with my family years ago, my two younger brothers were on one team. Whenever it was their turn, they would debate the question between themselves, veering off into all sorts of unrelated topics, false memories, and logical fallacy. It was all I could do to keep from laughing as I imagined how far from the truth their answer would be, but time and again, they surprised me by coming up with the correct answers.
In retrospect, I think that one or both of them must have known every correct answer, but they didn’t know how they knew it. All the so-called reasoning that led them to the answer was just a way to chew up some time while their brains worked on fetching it in the background. When the right answer finally surfaced, they recognized it as correct. It was one of the more striking examples of intuition in action that I have ever witnessed.
I had to admire their feat, but I could never imitate it or advise anyone else to attempt to do so. Like most people in my profession, I prefer sound logic and verifiable data when available. Perhaps more importantly, I want to know where I can’t be certain, and to what degree.
Even though “knowledge is power” in business you can’t always afford to wait for knowledge; sometimes you need to make a decision based on what little you know, informed by your past experience. That’s where intuition plays a useful role even in a technical occupation like IT consulting. Some people refer to it as “trusting your gut,” but I prefer to think of it as knowing something without knowing precisely why.
I don’t want to encourage magical thinking, so here’s a concrete example that’s simpler than your average software problem: a card game. In almost every game involving a deck of cards, it benefits your decision making to know what cards the other players have — but that information is usually hidden. As you become a more experienced player, you notice what cards have been played; perhaps you even keep a mental count of the more important cards that you see, and note behaviors that might indicate that your opponent does or does not have a specific card. If you keep playing long enough, you’ll “know” where certain cards are, without any scientific proof. It’s not magic — your brain can perceive a pattern based on your past experience for which you don’t yet possess a theory.
The same thing happens in IT consulting and in other businesses. When you’ve been there many times before, you can smell when something isn’t right — even if you can’t put a name on it. You can also notice an opportunity before you’ve thought of a plan to exploit it.
Thus it seems obvious that the more you know about a subject, the better your intuitions will be. In practice, though, once we’ve invested a lot of energy into a canonical way of thinking about a subject, it’s difficult for us to let any thought outside that discipline receive any attention. We can become too narrowly focused to pick up on other cues. In my experience, the best intuitions come to me in a situation where I have a lot of related experience, but just enough ignorance to be novel.
That makes IT consulting a good career for me. All of my clients share the common problems of software development, but their individual challenges differ enough to keep me on my toes. I still strive for hard data where it can be found, and I work now more than ever on self-education, but where those fall short, I’m learning not to overthink it and to trust my intuitions.
That’s all from my experience in IT.

Successful IT Governance

There was a time when I was working in a organization where there was no process in place for DC operation, every other manager was setting up there own processes to help and manage Data center operations. In this scenario bottom line was affected & most of the employee's were confused about their own & organization’s growth, which ultimately leads to mismanagement of vendors, suppliers, partners, & most important customers.
Aha, So I Was wondering about how to setup a Successful IT Governance in highly valued organization like mine was.
So, I came across following 5 aspects. After much devoted thought, I think these might help managers to create a Successful IT Governance in the organization.
a.   Alignment of IT objective with respect to business objective.
b.   Value delivery to drive maximum business value from IT investment.
c.   A handy risk management processes should be in  place to ensure that risks have been managed respect to business objective.
d.   Resource management - high level of ethical direction for outsourcing, insourcing and use of IT resource.
e.   Performance measurement, verify strategic compliance. Achievement of strategic IT objective.

The new world of risk management for Project Managers

After a long risk management session at PMI Hyderabad club, in which the project managers share with us their try to get the team to consider all reasonable risks and opportunities, most of the PM asked their team after the session, the wrap-up question, “Are there any other risks we haven’t captured?” Some sarcastic team member will inevitably respond with what he considers to be an out-there scenario: “The building could blow up!” or “The next great depression might start!” The point of these remarks is usually to tell the PM to stop taking everyone’s time spinning improbable scenarios of disaster and just let the engineers get on with their work. If the twenty-first century has taught us anything, it’s that these out-there predictions have a nasty habit of occurring. In fact, the incidence of these improbable events, and their obvious impact, has inspired a theory that is described in the best-selling book The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb. The author’s proposition, in short, is that the “human brain is wired for pattern recognition and so it sees patterns and narratives where none exist.” This gives rise to the fallacy that we can accurately predict the future from the past and that events will follow the patterns that we have recently observed (fishbone kind of).  The occurrence of risk events previously thought of as remote as. How did our risk models fail us so completely?, and the ideas expressed in The Black Swan are influencing risk managers in all industries.

Risk management in IT projects

What does this have to do with risk management in a project context? Risk management can become a unnoticeable exercise, in which project teams will plot out a few obvious problem scenarios, such as hardware that arrives dead or software that won’t install properly, and leave it at that. I’ve even seen teams that have a standing risk list and just append it to their scope document, assuming that the risks and the contingency measures we should put in place are the same for every project. Risks are often evaluated in isolation from each other, so that the cascade effects from one negative event are not thought through and managed properly. IT outsourcing, or engaging consultants, is a form of risk transfer; however, many IT consultants and service firms don’t have a knowledge / grasp of risk pricing, so they allow their customers to shift risk to them without getting the appropriate rewards for taking on that risk. So, in this new environment where everyone is more conscious of risk management, how should IT PMs change their approach to risk? Here are a few notable points:

• Consider the improbable: While it may be unlikely that the next great depression or a collapsing building will impact your next project, we’ve seen that these unlikely events can occur. Don’t allow the sarcasm or confidence of your delivery team to defer you from asking the right questions about catastrophic possibilities and from considering how you’ll mitigate these risks. The building may not fall, but the data center could get flooded or lose power or get an EMP attack, or the delivery truck could get stolen (all scenarios I’ve seen in real time and experienced the failure of projects due to that). Force your team to walk through the less obvious, and sometimes the improbable, and you’ll find that this discussion flushes out some real risks that you must consider.
• Follow the cascade: Adverse events often have deep cascade effects, In IT project work, I’ve seen this phenomenon when teams don’t plot the intersections of events and requirements and fail to account for the impact that adverse events will have across the entire spectrum of project tasks. The simplest hardware failure or software glitch can cascade across the entire project, but teams are frequently divided into infrastructure, production support, packaged software integration, and development. It’s the role of PMs to ensure that the cross-discipline impacts of risks are identified and mitigated, as the PM is often the only resource on the project looking across all the delivery elements.
• Beware hidden assumptions: As risk managers has learned, assumptions about what might fail, how it would affect the rest of the project, and what the worst-case scenario might look like are often colored by emotion, ego, rationalization, and self-interest. As any experienced PM can confirm, any IT technician who has had a good run can fall into this category. We’re all subject to the risk of believing in our own competence, and we all have highly tuned rationalization engines that can convince us that things will work out well because they have so far. PMs must challenge these rationalizations and expressions of overconfidence to ensure that emotion is not blocking the team from uncovering the real risks to the project.
• Get paid for risk: One of the most characteristic errors I see, that  IT service firms and contract PMs make is to allow the client to transfer risk to them without getting paid for it. Too many firms end up doing rework or free work on projects that were inherently risky, but were priced at the same rate as less risky, IT operational type projects. There’s a risk in any engagement, whether you’re upgrading Windows or developing an entirely new software from scratch; many firms will price these efforts at the same billable rate, often without a risk contingency budget, and then end up eating the overages when things don’t go in the right direction. I would suggest that every project estimate includes a risk premium. Presenting the internal or external client with a separate risk premium sends the message that the team has seriously considered the level of risk this project carry. It also prepares the client for the reality that every project will have unknowns and adverse events.

Most of the IT project from 9/11 era has learned in the past few years that our risk calculations must be broader, deeper, than they were previously. In the world of the IT PM, we must take advantage of the painful lessons of other project / risk managers and ensure that we’re thinking about the mitigation of even unlikely events and that we’re considering the cascade effects of every risk we identify.
That’s all form me now.

What are the data center technologies?

Alternative Energy: Solar, wind and hydro show great potential for generating electricity in an eco-friendly manner. Nuclear and hydro show great potential for grid based, green power. However, the biggest challenge when it comes to using alternative energy for your data center applications is the need for a constant supply at high service levels. If you use alternative energy but still need to buy from the local power company when hit with peak loads, many of the economic benefits youre reaping from the alternative energy source will disappear quickly. As new storage mechanisms are developed that capture and store the excess capacity so it can be accessed when needed, then alternative energy sources will play a much greater role in the data center than they do today. Water and air based storage systems show great potential as eco-friendly energy storage options.
Ambient Return: This is a system whereby air returns to the air conditioner unit naturally and unguided. This method is inefficient in some applications because it is prone to mixing hot and cold air, and to stagnation caused by static pressure, among other problems.
Chiller based cooling: A type of cooling where chilled water is used to dissipate heat in the CRAC unit (rather than glycol or refrigerant). The heat exchanger in a chiller based system can be air or water cooled. Chiller based system provide CRAC units with greater cooling capacity than DX based systems. Besides removing the DX limitation of a 24° F. spread between output and input, the chiller system can adjust dynamically based on load.
Chimney effect: Just as your home chimney leverages air pressure differences to drive exhaust, the same principle can be used in the data center. This has lead to a common design with cool air being fed below a raised floor and pulled into the data center as hot air escapes above through the chimney. This design creates a very efficient circulation of cool air while minimizing air mixing.
Cloud computing: This is a style of computing that is dynamically scalable through virtualized resources provided as a service over the Internet. In this model the customer need not be concerned with the technical details of the remote resources. (That's why it is often depicted as a cloud in system diagrams.) There are many different types of cloud computing options with variations in security, backup, control, compliance and quality of service that must be thoroughly vetted to assure their use does not put the organization at risk.
Cogeneration: This is the use of an engine (typically diesel or natural gas based) to generate electricity and useful heat simultaneously. The heat emitted by the engine in a data center application can be used by an "absorption chiller" (a type of chiller that converts heat energy into cooling) providing cooling benefits in addition to electric power. In addition, excess electricity generated by the system can be sold back to the power grid to defray costs. In practice, the effective ROI of cogeneration is heavily dependent on the spread between the cost of electricity and fuel. The cogeneration alternative will also contribute to substantial increase in CO2 emissions for the facility. This runs counter to the trend toward eco-friendly solutions and will create a liability in Cap and Trade carbon trading.
Colocation: Colocation is one of several business models where your data center facilities are provided by another company. In the colocation option, data centers for multiple organizations can be housed in the same facility sharing common power and cooling infrastructure and facilities management. Colocation differs from a dedicated hosting provider in that the client owns its own IT systems and has greater flexibility in what systems and applications reside in their data center. The lines are blurred between the various outsourcing models with variations in rights, responsibilities and risks. For this reason, when evaluating new facilities it is important to make sure the business terms align properly with your long term needs for the space.
Containers: The idea of a data center in a container is that all the power, cooling, space and connectivity can be provisioned incrementally through self contained building blocks, or standard sized shipping containers. These containers can be placed outside your place of business to expand data center capacity or may be deployed in a warehouse type environment. The primary benefit data center containers provide are that they support rapid deployment and are integrated and tuned to support very high power densities. Containers have been embraced for use in cloud type services by Google and Microsoft. The potential downsides of containers are several. They are expensive (more per useable SF than custom built facilities), tend to be homogeneous (designed for specific brands/models of systems) and are intended for autonomous operation (the container must remain sealed to operate within specifications).
CRAC (Computer Room Air Conditioner): A CRAC is a specialized air conditioner for data center applications that can add moisture back into the air to maintain the proper humidity level required by the electronic systems.
DX cooling (direct expansion): A compressor and glycol/refrigerant based system that uses airflow to dissipate heat. The evaporator is in direct contact with the air stream, so the cooling coil of the airside loop is also the evaporator of the refrigeration loop. The term "direct" refers to the position of the evaporator with respect to the airside loop. Because a DX-based system can reduce the air temperature by a maximum of 23° F, they are much more limited in application when compared to more flexible chiller based systems.
Economizer: As part of a data center cooling system, air economizers expel the hot air generated by the servers/devices outdoors and draw in the relatively cooler outside air (instead of cooling and recirculating the hot air from the servers). Depending on the outdoor temperature, the air conditioning chiller can either be partially or completely bypassed, thereby providing what is referred to as free cooling. Naturally, this method of cooling is most effective in cooler climates.
Fan tile: A raised floor data center tile with powered fans that improve airflow in a specific area. Fan tiles are often used to help remediate hot spots. Hot spots are often the result of a haphazard rack and server layout, or an overburdened or inadequate cooling system. The use of fan tiles may alleviate a hot spot for a period of time, but improved airflow and cooling systems that reduce electricity demands generally are a better option for most facilities.
Floor to Ceiling Height: In modern, high-density data centers, the floor to ceiling height has taken on greater importance in site selection. In order to build a modern, efficient facility, best practices now call for a 36-foot (or more) raised floor plenum to distribute cool air efficiently throughout the facility (with overhead power and cabling). In addition, by leveraging the chimney effect and hot air return, the system can efficiently reject the hot air while introducing a constant flow of cool air to the IT systems. To build a facility upgradeable to 400 watts/SF, you should plan on a floor to ceiling height of at least 18 feet. Some data center designs forego a raised floor and utilize custom airflow ducting and vertical isolation. Since this is a fairly labor intensive process and is tuned to a specific rack layout, it may not be suitable for installations where the floor plan is likely to evolve over the life of the data center.
Flywheel UPS system: A low-friction spinning cylinder that generates power from kinetic energy, and continues to spin when grid power is interrupted. The flywheel provides ride-through electricity to keep servers online until the generators can start up and begin providing power. Flywheels are gaining attention as an eco-friendly and space saving alternative to traditional battery based UPS systems. The downside to flywheel power backup is that the reserve power lasts only 15-45 seconds as compared to a 20 minute window often built into battery backups.
Hot Aisle/Cold Aisle: Mixing hot air (from servers) and cold air (from air conditioning) is one of the biggest contributors to inefficiencies in the data center. It creates hot spots, inconsistent cooling and unnecessary wear and tear on the cooling equipment. A best practice to minimize air mixing is to align the racks so that all equipment exhausts in the same direction. This is achieved simply by designating the aisles between racks as either exclusively hot-air outlets or exclusively cool-air intakes. With this type of deployment, cold air is fed to the front of the racks by the raised floor and then exhausted from the hot aisles overhead.
NOC (Network Operations Center): A service responsible for monitoring a computer network for conditions that may require special attention to avoid a negative impact on performance. Services may include emergency support to remediate Denial-of-Service attacks, loss of connectivity, security issues, etc…
Rack Unit: A rack unit or U (less commonly, RU) is a unit of measure describing the height of equipment intended for mounting in a computer equipment mounting rack. One rack unit is 1.75 inches (44.45 mm) high.
RTU (Rooftop Unit): RTUs allow facilities operators to place data center air conditioning components on the building's roof, thereby conserving raised white space while improving efficiency. In addition, as higher performance systems become available, RTUs can be easily upgraded without affecting IT operations.
Power-density: As servers and storage systems evolve to become ever more powerful and compact, they place a greater strain on the facility to deliver more power, reject more heat and maintain adequate backup power reserves (both battery backup and onsite power generation). When analyzing power-density, it is best to think in terms of Kw/rack and total power, not just watts per square foot (which is a measure of facility capacity).
Power Density Paradox: Organizations with limited data center space often turn to denser equipment to make better use of the space available to them. However, due to the need for additional power, cooling and backup to drive and maintain this denser equipment, an inversion point is reached where the total need for data center space increases rather than falls. This is the power density paradox. The challenge is to balance the density of servers and other equipment with the availability of power, cooling and space in order to gain operating efficiencies and lower net costs.
Raised-floor plenum: This is the area between the data center sub floor and the raised floor tiles. It is typically used to channel pressurized cold air up through floor panels to cool equipment. It has also been used to route network and power cables, but this is not generally recommended for new data center design.
Remote hands: In a hosted or colocation data center environment, remote hands refers to the vendor-supplied, on-site support services for engineering assistance, including the power cycling of IT equipment, visual inspection, cabling and maybe even swap out of systems.
Steam Humidification: Through the natural cooling process of air conditioning, the humidity levels of a data center are reduced, just as you would find in a home or office air conditioning environment. However, due to the constant load of these AC systems, too much moisture is removed from most IT environments and must be reintroduced to maintain proper operating humidity levels for IT equipment. Most CRAC units use a relatively expensive heat/steam generation process to increase humidity. These steam-based systems also increase the outflow temperature from the CRAC unit and decrease its overall cooling effectiveness.
Ultrasonic Humidification: Ultrasonic humidification uses a metal diaphragm vibrating at ultrasonic frequencies and a water source to introduce humidity into the air. Because it does not use heat and steam to create humidity, ultrasonic systems are 95% more energy efficient than the traditional steam-based systems found in most CRAC units. Most environments can easily be converted from steam based to ultrasonic humidification.
UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply): This is a system that provides backup electricity to IT systems in the event of a power failure until the backup power supply can kick in. UPS systems are traditionally battery and inverter based systems, with some installations taking advantage of flywheel-based technology.
VFD (Variable Frequency Drive): A system for controlling the rotational speed of an alternating current (AC) electric motor by controlling the frequency of the electrical power supplied to the motor. VFDs save energy by allowing the volume of fluid/air to adjust to match system's demands rather than having the motor operating at full capacity only.
Virtualization: As servers have become more and more powerful, they have also (in general) become underutilized. The challenge to IT organizations has been to compartmentalize applications so they can be self contained and autonomous while at the same time sharing compute capacity with other applications on the same device. This is the challenge addressed by virtualization. Virtualization is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as an operating system, a server, a storage device or network resources. Through virtualization, multiple resources can reside on a single device (thereby addressing the problem of underutilization) and many systems can be managed on an enterprise-wide basis.
Watts per Square Foot: When describing a data center's capacity, watts per square foot is one way to describe the facility's aggregate capacity. For example, a 1,000 square foot facility with 1 MW power and cooling capacity will support an average deployment of 100 watts per square foot across its raised floor. Since some of this space may have CRAC units and hallways, the effective power density supported by the facility may be much greater (up to the 1MW total capacity). Facilities designed for 60 W/SF deployments just a few years ago cannot be upgraded to support the 400 W/SF loads demanded by modern, high density servers.

Drive-by tasks as a Project? How to prioritize them?

Basically, “drive-by” projects are all those ad-hoc tasks or initiatives that get dropped in your lap at random intervals every day. They suck up time, they suck up resources, they distract project teams, and have the potential to push active projects behind schedule. Often they are emergency projects that have no strategic initiative attached to them, which is critical for organizations that rely on project-based work to keep teams focused on the right projects. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that they are of no value. In fact, it’s not always about separating the good projects from the bad projects. It’s usually a matter of choosing the best projects, the projects that will provide the most business value from a list of good potential projects. Unfortunately, when project teams are faced with dealing with a “drive-by” project, all the work to keep teams focused on those initiatives that drive the most business value gets thrown out the window. I believe that’s why the “get’er done” or “drive-by” project is such a problem. They may be worthy, but if they don’t measure up to the “does this provide the most value” test, they ultimately limit an organization’s capacity to work on the things that do. And that negatively impacts productivity—and ultimately profitability. In theory, everyone agrees with this, however, practice is something different. In the heat of the moment, it’s difficult for decision-makers to step back and ask the question, “Will this “drive-by” project provide enough value that someone should drop what he or she is doing to work on it?” Sometimes the answer is definitely yes, but there are times when the answer should be NO. If nobody asks the question, project teams can be chasing around working on projects of minimal value (at least projects that haven’t be vetted to make sure they are the best projects for teams to be working on). Project and portfolio management best practices revolve around the concept of identifying those projects that meet certain criteria, creating a plan, and then executing on the plan. Project management software does a pretty good job of helping do that. However, sometimes we need to ask ourselves, “How does my work management methodology address ‘drive-by’ tasks and projects that come up every day?” It doesn’t have to be a catastrophic failure that causes an organization to falter. Sometimes it’s the accumulated weight of a thousand insignificant inefficiencies that cause the most damage. How does your work management methodology address the “drive-by” project? Even if your software doesn’t, feel free to share what you do to keep your project teams focused on the right projects.

How to invent Your Personal Brand!

What are you known for? What do people say about you when you leave the room? (They are talking about you, aren't they?) How can you burnish your reputation to win that promotion or land that new client? You've diligently focused on your personal brand for years — but what if you now want to reinvent yourself? It happens all the time. A financial services executive moves into retail. A techie wants to try marketing. A VC wants to jump ship and become a life coach. Your path may make perfect sense to you, but how can you convince others to embrace your new brand — and take you seriously? Here are five steps to reinventing yourself for the business marketplace.

1. What's Your Destination? First, you need to develop a detailed understanding of where you want to go, and the knowledge and skills necessary to get there. If you've been a techie for the past decade, you may understand every new marketing toy out there, from Facebook to Foursquare. But can you effectively convey that knowledge to a non-technical audience? Learning the skills you need will help you gain the confidence necessary to start identifying (and publicizing) yourself in your new identity.
2. Leverage Your Points of Difference. In marketing, we call it a USP — a "Unique Selling Proposition". What makes you different from anyone else? That's what people will remember, and you can use it to your advantage.
3. Develop a Narrative. You used to write award-winning business columns — and now you want to review restaurants? It's human nature to have many interests, to seek new experiences, and to want to develop new skills over the course of your life. Unfortunately, there's a popular word to describe that profound quest: dilettante. It's unfair, but to protect your brand you need to develop a coherent narrative arc that explains to people — in a nice, simple way so they can't miss it — exactly how your past fits into the present. "I used to write about the business side of many industries, including food and wine," you could say. "I realized my big-picture knowledge about agricultural trends and business finance made me uniquely positioned to cover restaurants with a different perspective." It's like a job interview — you're turning what could be perceived as a weakness (he doesn't know anything about food, because he's been a business reporter for 20 years) into a compelling strength that people can remember (he's got a different take on the food industry because he has knowledge most other people don't).
4. Reintroduce Yourself. The vast majority of people, regrettably, aren't paying much attention to you. That means their perceptions are probably a few years out of date — and it's not their fault. With hundreds (or thousands) of Facebook friends and vague social connections, we can't expect everyone to remember all the details of our lives. So we have to strategically re-educate our friends and acquaintances — because, especially if we're launching a new business venture, they're going to be our buyers and recommenders. That means a concerted effort to phone or email everyone on your list — individually — to let them know about your new direction and, where appropriate, ask for their help, advice, or business.
5. Prove Your Worth. There's a difference between my knowing that you've launched a new graphic design business and trusting that you'll do a good job for clients. I may like you a lot, but unless I see proof of your skills, I may hesitate to put my own reputation on the line by sending you referrals. That's where blogs, podcasts, videocasts, and other forms of social media come in. It's critical to let potential customers see what you're about and test drive your approach before they make a large commitment. Checking out your image gallery and seeing a roster of attractive corporate logos you've designed may allay my fears enough to send you that major new account.

So what are your best strategies for reinventing your personal brand?