Green IT Virtually - a Real Effort

I have always disliked the large retailers trying to pretend they have qualified staff to repair computers or even worse offer businesses computer support. They obtain certifications by hiring consultants at the head office and the certification is then waved around and shared with all nation wide locations that have no certified techs on the staff. Of course it is one thing to install a new hard drive for a home computer, but advertising support for mission critical business computers storing confidential data by the retail operations just because they sell some business gadgets is something I cannot accept.

A couple years ago CBC’s Venture documentary TV show put together a wonderful undercover piece on Geek Squad, Nerds Onsite and similar high volume low quality per incident repair shops that exposed the extreme repair costs and flat out lies when diagnosing a sick computer. I was not surprised and still could not help but be upset as these companies give all those hard working and honest small computer sales and services shops a bad reputation.  Luckily Websdepot has never concentrated on computer repairs or sales nor home users as the market was saturated by the fly by night computer hacks.

While Websdepot is focused on managed services and help desk for small and medium businesses in the Greater Toronto Area we always do get the occassional per incident client shopping around with these home user focused service providers that sell business class hardware and software.  I always warn business owners against these short term one off relationships as an IT infrastructure is not just cheap hardware and computers but an integrated operational data system that needs to fulfil business processes that no high school “geek” paid bonuses to sell Best Buy equipment can comprehend.

What really made me at long last write my thougths on Best Buy and their Beetle driving Geek Squad staff is what I witnessed at a Best Buy store when picking up a digital camera I ordered online. As I was standing in line at the one open cash register I realized that Best Buy now has a greeter at the main doors who also does the Costco thing by asking for your receipt as you exit. I will leave that rant for another day as it took no less than four people for me to interact with to pickup an online order, but I bring this greeter up because of what I saw him do with a Geek Squad staff member. 

The early twenty something Geek Squad staff member who I indentified by the Geek Squad logo all over his jacket was smiling happily and walking rather briskly towards the exit as I assume he was done for day as it was 5:30pm and we know that most businesses don’t require support after hours (yeah right!).   Anyhow, as he approached the Best Buy greeter at the door he quickly and routinely took off his jacket and passed it to the greeter.  The greeter promptly checked the pockets of the jacket and handed it back to the young Geek who bolted out the main exit doors towards the parking lot.

I couldn’t believe what I had just witnessed.  It is one thing for me not to trust the skill set of these young Geek Squad members, but when their own employer does not trust them enough to not walk out with store inventory then would you trust them with not only your company hardware assets but your valuable information? Best Buy has more cameras than most banks and they still need a greeter checking the pockets of a technician as he goes home for the day?  I just could not believe it and had to laugh.  What a way to treat your employees and who are they hiring if they cannot be trusted…no one is expecting bondable service from these operations, but shoplifting??

My advice to all you business owners who do partake in the services of these large retailers or other Volkswagen Beetle driving geeks is to check their pockets before they leave!  However, in truth that is the least of your worries as they will knowingly or unknowingly rip you off more on bogus misdiagnosed repair costs or other services as they are learning on the job on your dollar.

Happy shopping!!

Dom

I am continually suprised how often we take over the IT duties for a new client that has gone through what I like to call “IT HELL”.  IT guys have their own IT demons (yes you Microsoft!!) and may even think of their jobs as hellishly stressful, but when a business owner/manager cannot sleep at night and pulls out their hair trying to get some timely service that costs an arm and a leg then I consider that truly to be ”IT HELL”.  These business owners are not part of an IT department, they don’t care how things run, but more and more of their time is sucked into the abyss known as putting up with an IT deadbeat. Why do they put up with it you might ask? 

Simple answer, they don’t know any better.  They are so overwhelmed just running a business that relys on an IT infrastructure to be successful that they simply assume all IT providers are built equal.  Yes, the assumption is that IT shops big and small only crank out 2 types of models - the over priced I am more important than you and too busy to return your call amply certified convertable or the I got this cool stuff to work in my mind and will break everything on your system taking forever to learn this on your dollar while working from my mom’s basement entry coupe.

The assumption that we are all equal is FALSE!!  I cannot stress this enough to all you business owners that might find your way to my blog.  Yes, these IT models do exist and my staff and I continually bump into them when taking over a site in complete IT disarray or are forced to play nice with them as they support a third party application we are not certified on.  If it makes anyone feel better we also get ignored by these guys and our phonecalls are not returned in a timely fashion.  We see firsthand your frustration in IT HELL and cannot believe how many bad apples are out there staying in business - heck, making a lot of money on your misfortunes.  I hope that you find salvation and realize that there are many good IT companies out there that hire great IT professionals and I don’t use that word “professional” loosely as it takes a real professional to deliver a level of service that can actually grow your business instead of hindering it with continual downtime and late nights wondering if your data is safe.

Come over from the darkside and visit us at www.websdepot.com or better yet email us your current IT guys’ names so that I can talk some sense into them as I don’t want them to end up in hell for putting you through IT Hell on a daily basis. Enough is enough and you deserve better.

Happy Computing!

Dom

It has been a busy month and we are well on our way to creating an affordable mini data center. Okay it is more of a server room but with our virtualization initiative we will host more servers per square foot in this space using less electricity to power and cool the mission critical application assets of our clients than any data center in the Greater Toronto Area.

How can we do this you ask? Well let me share some of our plans with you and how far we’ve got so far as we really have made great strides.

The room itself is an old storage space which we referred to as the bunker as it had 3 unfinished concrete walls and one steel studs wall finished with drywall along with an old wooden door. We buried all our spare equipment and old office furniture in this space as it was deep within the belly of the beast we call Websdepot Head Office. Since we were paying for the square footage as part of our lease it would make sense to actually use the space for something other than storage. So the renovation began.  Estimates for the proposed work came in and I gladly approved them as this space would very quickly bring in revenue and dare I say it? PROFIT by going green!

As the renovation began, the data drops were mapped out, an independent electrical panel to serve just this space was installed and all the electrical wiring conduits were planned out to accommodate all the new 42U server racks coming in.  The suspended ceiling was installed, the HVAC system supplying the entire building was disabled for this space as we knew that to keep our cooling costs down and go green a more efficient cooling solution dedicated to just this space would need to be implemented. The floor and walls were finished to make it look like the typical boring data center so that it does not take much imagination to compare our green virtually condensed space with an equivalent old school data center. The one non concrete wall was reinforced and a massive solid steel door was installed with heavy duty secure combination entry system.

Everyone got really exciting when the server racks arrived as we could finally see the finished product for the space and that means we were close to the actual virtualization work.  The following week the water cooled air conditioning solution was installed. It would use less power than our 2 portable A/C units and HVAC system for the equivalent space where we housed our own internal servers under a configuration of space most of our clients currently have themselves at their sites.

Then end of the month the web enabled camera system was setup covering the entry and exit points to the space as we will want our clients to be able to see where their information assets sit and that we indeed keep the lights off in this space unless one of the techs is in there around 9am or 4pm filling out the daily operations checklist. They will even be able to zoom in on the thermostat and see that we set it to 22 degrees Celsius as it’s a server room not a freezer.  I mention this because studies have shown that the life cycle of server and networking equipment does not change if running in a 19 versus 22 degree Celsius environment if the air flow is optimised.  Yet you don’t need David Suzuki to tell you that for each degree Celsius raised you save on the cooling energy costs.

Electricians just finished wiring up the UPS systems in the racks and we are now awaiting the server and related toys to build the virtual server hosting environment based on the Citrix XenServer platform.  That’s our secret sauce of this green initiative - so I saved the best for last in this blog post revealing one major part of our going green virtually strategy which will outperform all other data centers in the Greater Toronto area.

More on storage virtualization which is another key component of our strategy to come next week. Can’t wait for the new Dell servers to arrive.

Happy Computing!

As I begin writing my first post on this blog I cannot help, but think that somehow this whole adventure will be turned into a Canadian IT classic on what not to do titled “Dom of Green Cables”.  I am not worried though as the best lessons are the painful ones and if even just one person learns something in the process then I am satisfied. Most importantly, i will be able to say that Websdepot practices what it preaches and is itself a company that has adopted true “green” methodologies instead of just slapping on a green label to sell into the latest trend.

The mission or I should say our mission statement for top secret Project Green is ”to take advantage of virtualization, the latest hardware or software developments, partnerships and common sense to become a greener managed services provider guiding clients past the hype, the pretenders and onto the operational cost saving contenders”.

Okay that is enough for the first post. My techs tell me to keep these short and since I am new to the blogging world as I prefered to spend my time onsite helping clients run their businesses with the best IT services we were capable of delivering I defer to their expertise on the topic of blogging. I am happy to be here now and feel this will help many of our clients and web visitors in ways that my unscheduled phone call or monthly newsletter could not. 

Project Green is now officially on the way as I run around and turn off all the lights in the office.

Cheers.