So, it\u2019s 11:00 on a Friday evening. You\u2019ve been out on a date, enjoying your night, when your phone rings. It\u2019s work. You know from experience that this can\u2019t be good; but\u2026you are the one on call, so you have to answer it. And\u2026just as you suspected, it\u2019s not good. You have a server down and you need to go take care of it.\u00a0 What a way to ruin your night, huh? So, you take your date home and head to the office, only to find out that some home-grown application caused a memory halt on your server.\u00a0 All you need to do is to cycle the power. Wow\u2026if you would have known it was going to be a three minute job, you could have had your date tag along with you. Oh well\u2026might as well go home and sulk over the missed opportunity to continue your date.<\/p>\n
Finding and keeping employees around the clock can get expensive.\u00a0 First, there\u2019s the arduous task of actually finding a competent IT person who is willing to work overnight. The process itself will need your time to write the job description; time from HR to butcher it for you; money to post the ad on the multitude of job sites out there; HR\u2019s time to screen the candidates (if there are any); more of your time to interview the candidates; don\u2019t forget background checks and credential verification. Then, if by some miracle you actually find someone capable of handling problems as they arise, you have to pay them; and pay for their benefits; and there\u2019s shift-differential. Oh, and don\u2019t forget about the mandatory all-employee meeting coming up that you will have to pay them overtime to attend. Of course, there are things like new employee orientation, and time to ramp up on your network and the job itself.\u00a0 Whew\u2026I\u2019m tired just writing about all the stuff that goes into hiring a new employee.\u00a0 And, all of this is typically more of a process because it is outside of \u201cnormal\u201d working hours.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s make a visit to our college in Hill Top Rural College Town, USA. I don\u2019t know if you know this or not, but college students get a little testy when they can\u2019t get to the applications that they need to do the homework that they blew off until the day before it\u2019s due. And, you just got home from a long day at the office.\u00a0 Oh\u2026and you live in the bigger town about 30 miles from the college.\u00a0 Better head back into the school so that you can get that application back up and running, because the rest of the students are gaming online and you can\u2019t remote into the server.\u00a0 Once again, it took only a few minutes to get the application back up, but now you\u2019re late for dinner and you\u2019re missing out on valuable time with your kids.\u00a0 On the way home, you\u2019re looking up at the incoming thunderstorm and thinking to yourself, \u201cThey don\u2019t pay me enough for this.\u201d<\/p>\n
And, lest we forget…there are facilities related folks that you will need to have on staff and trained up on your cooling and power systems.\u00a0 These systems don’t take care of themselves.\u00a0 There are lots of different ways that they can break.\u00a0 And, there are lots of different preventive maintenance tasks that need to be performed in order to keep them running efficiently.\u00a0 Every time I have added responsibility of this kind of thing to my facilities folks, the director wasn’t too happy with me; in fact, I’ve been tattled on in the past.<\/p>\n
IT infrastructure staffing can be a nightmare, no matter where you are at in our geographically disperse examples.\u00a0 Housing your infrastructure equipment (servers, core switches, routers, firewalls, etc.) in a data center can alleviate all of these staffing issues.\u00a0 Nearly all third-party data centers will have staff on-hand 24×7, 365.\u00a0 All it takes is a simple phone call to their 24×7, 365 hotline and you can get them to power-cycle the server, or unlock the application, or reboot a switch, or replace a tape, or swap out a bad hard drive, or\u2026and the list goes on.\u00a0 You don\u2019t have to worry about your overnight person going on vacation and leaving a big hole to fill.\u00a0 You don\u2019t have to worry about benefits for the employees (Bazinga \u2013 more CFO points).\u00a0 You don\u2019t have to spend valuable hours working through the hiring process and training people to take care of your network.\u00a0 And, you can save yourself countless hours of driving back and forth during off hours to do five minutes of work, while your family attends your child\u2019s sporting event without you.\u00a0 Let your friendly, 24×7, 365 data center staff do all that for you.<\/p>\n
Join us next week for the last of this series of blog posts when we talk about physical security and protection of your equipment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Staffing So, it\u2019s 11:00 on a Friday evening. You\u2019ve been out on a date, enjoying your night, when your phone rings. It\u2019s work. You know from experience that this can\u2019t be good; but\u2026you are the one on call, so you have to answer it. And\u2026just as you suspected, it\u2019s not good. You have a server<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=853"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":864,"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853\/revisions\/864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enseva.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}