Nearly 10 years ago, Greig helped me put in our first Server Rack. Out of the 22U of available space, I think we only had two servers that took up 8U between them, so it was a little overkill. As IT Partners grew in terms of the team size and capability we started to fill it, and last year we reached capacity.
With some future growth planned we decided for an APC Enterprise Rack, with extra depth and width – so much easier to work on. Frazer is our resident guru on rack design, planning, and implementation. The planning documents alone were a work of art!
This weekend (10/4) we moved to a larger rack, and added another storage tray to our DS3300 (networked storage). Overall it went very well, and the rack has set a new benchmark internally for all our engineers to bring their sites up to.
A tidy and well-designed rack aids troubleshooting, allows easier disaster recovery, helps prevent errors and hazards, allows for better cooling (and thus lower operating costs), and makes it easier to expand sites.
Lastly, from the files of firmware upgrade fixes, here’s a helpful note to those of you who have IBM Server Connectivity Modules (the rest of the world calls these “switches”). Should you lose uplinks and can’t access the web console, update the Advanced Management Module firmware. Refer to: IBM AMM firmware matrix and this article on boardreader.com
Thank you to both our clients and the IT Partners team for a great 1st quarter! Every way you look at it we have had an excellent start to the year, with lots of interesting project work, some great new clients, further additions to the team, and some useful new technologies and systems on the way to being implemented.
Some interesting research …
It is always good to find some research that backs up some long held assumptions, although we must note it was paid for by Microsoft. The report can be found here, but the key quote from the researcher for me was …
“Our assessment of the report tells us that an increased focus on IT correlates with good performance in all of the size categories surveyed,” said Dale Vile, research director of Freeform Dynamics. “This whole picture corroborates the notion that technology and hosted services can provide tangible business advantage, even for smaller companies, and it’s not surprising to see that investment in IT and hosting goes hand in hand with good financial performance.”
IT Partners supports systems that are housed internally and hosted externally, and has recently entered the Microsoft Accelerate program for Microsoft Online Services.