Data Center Management...

[ChrisPope]

How do you manage your data centers? Giving the mixture of Cloud approaches with Public, Private, Hybrid and consuming SaaS applications/services, the matrix is even more complex now.

Managing and understanding the services you have, who or how they are delivered is critical to a successful IT organization.

I would really like to hear from the community on what they do, how they do it, what tools they use and so on,

Chris

[kchorny]

Firstly, you need to know who those customers are.  We use Business Services to do that.  We have 14 data centers, and 'Colocation' business services for each of those locations.  Every customer 'company' that is colocated in one of our data centers is subscribed to the appropriate business service.  

Then you need to know who the stakeholders are at each company.  We have a form that we require from every user who is authorized to request support for the services we provide to them.  That form signifies the level of authority that user has (can they authorize others to have access, can they request billable changes, do they wish to receive maintenance/outage notifications, do they need physical access).  These are all stored in a custom table.

Whenever we have a scheduled change or unscheduled outage, we select the impacted business service on a custom 'broadcast notification' form that is available from the change request form and the incident form.  When that form is submitted it triggers a script that finds all of the companies that are subscribed to that business service, and then emails all of the users (separately) at each company that have opted-in to the notifications.  We use color coded banners in the emails to help the receiver understand the impact (red - outage, yellow - possible outage and/or service restoring, green - all clear and/or no impact expected).

Is this the type of information you were looking for or did I completely miss the mark. 🙂

[Tejin]

Thank you ! That's exactly I was looking for. And will need to implement same kind of outage and maintenance notification as you have described in your earlier posts.