Member Interview: From Data Center Mover to Command Center Consolidator

As promised, at the Data Center Professional Network we want to feature you, the community members from time to time. Our very first interview for the Data Center Professional Network takes us to the United States. Austin, Texas, to be more exact. Harold Gilchrist has been a member since last March.

What company do you work for?
If you look in my profile, it says that I work at The Home Depot. But I left The Home Depot about a month ago, and I now work for the First Data Corp. First Data does credit card services, and do a lot of business in the UK. When you swipe your card, the transaction goes to them and they do all the reconcilliation with the banks. They're putting together a global command center, and I am leading the effort to do a convergence of all their current centers into a global one.

How long have you been in the data center business?
Wow... on and off about 20 years. I ran data centers for BellSouth, which is now AT&T. Then I did some similar work for EDS, and after that for Home Depot.

I was at Home Depot for five years. Originally, they had one corporate data center and decided they needed to establish a new one. They chose Austin and I was brought on to do the migration and to manage them both after.

How did that migration at Home Depot go?
“The planning was pretty extensive. We bought the data center, planned it and migrated services in less than a year, so we did it in a very short time frame. We were moving a lot of equipment between the two sites, with each about 40,000 square feet. We moved about 600 servers. It was a fairly significant effort. I previously had done data center moves for BellSouth. Compared to that, this was done on fairly short notice with lots of good planning, lots of good people and getting the focus of the entire organization to do it.

Was that the most significant challenge? Getting everything aligned?
“Absolutely! The easy thing to do in a data center move is just to find yourself a data center, refurbish it and make it ready. In this case the facility had been shut down for five years, but it still is the easy part. Going to vendors, buying some servers and letting the vendors help you populate them is not that difficult either.

No, the hard part was dealing with all the different applications and getting them on board for service transition from one data center to the next. That involved testing, and making sure that they operate. For example, we had latency as an issue with some of the applications. Our biggest problem was not knowing what our different applications talked to. We had applications that are referencing database instances that we just moved 900 miles away. That caused the unexpected latency. Back when the applications were developed, the concept of latency did not even exist since all the servers were local.

That's why we needed a lot of testing. We had them operating in two data centers simultaneously. I think the issue for most data centers today is not the physical, it is the logical. It is getting companies aligned, so they know what your goals are.

You mentioned you also migrated mainframes. Most companies that do mainframes don't migrate very often.
You know, I think mainframe migrations are easier than migrating open system servers. The easiest way to migrate it is to get assets that look just like that in the other site, synchronise data and have a service migration between them. Mainframes are so expensive that your vendor will give you a lot more help in buying a new one and setting it up. When you have a bunch of Windows and Unix servers, you probably won't get as much support since they are more commodity class. Plus, the tools for data replication are much more mature on mainframes. So mainframe migration went very smoothly there.

And then you switched jobs.
“Now, at First Data, I am no longer involved in the physical data centers. I have a higher level role, and I am not involved in the day to day operations, but I am consolidating multiple command centers into one. I like doing service maturity type projects. It is one thing to be 'the day to day guy' who is delivering operational services, it is another thing to be the guy that helps you plan how to do ITSM service maturity at a highel level. It is more planning, versus the tactical side. It would be great if data center managers take a step back from time to time and think about how to transform the whole thing, even if it is still working fine.”

I get to work with great people. I think the biggest thing is that the leadership at First Data wants to do service maturity, and want to do the migrations. One of the hardest thing operation managers, typically pretty technical people, face is to convince senior leadership about the way to achieve service maturity. Here there is a shared vision.”

Finally: what excites you the most?
“This is not a global statement, but I have the feeling companies are getting more aligned with what they want out of their data center environments than maybe they were 10 years ago. In the past, companies just wanted data centers to sit 'over there', run and don't cause any problems. Now they see data
centers as strategic assets. I think they are starting to see the value as we are slowly moving away from the recession.

Views: 36

Add a Comment

You need to be a member of The Data Center Professionals Network to add comments!

Join The Data Center Professionals Network

Connecting data center industry professionals worldwide. Free membership for eligible professionals.

Events

Follow Us

© 2024   Created by DCPNet Admin.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service