the beauty of a unified environment

[Thuleman]

I recently changed jobs which took me out of EDU and into the private sector.

One of the VAR engineers I used to work with would always say that he 'hated' the EDU sector because it was always such a hacked together environment. In my previous job as working manager I was responsible, and frankly proud, of a hacked together environment because of the low capex and TCO of tier 2 storage, refurbished one-gen behind servers, 3rd party support contracts, and so on.

Of course the whole "lower cost deployments" industry exists because there's either no money or organizations want to spend the money on other stuff.

In my new role I am an administrative manager of a compute & storage team in a 24/7 mission critical environment in a larger size org (just under 10k employees).

100% of the networking runs on Cisco (mostly 7k)
100% of the compute runs on Cisco UCS
100% of the storage runs on EMC

Even within one vendor the overwhelming majority of the gear is "unified". On the storage side we have VMAXes, Isilons, DataDomains, and VPLEX. Done and done.

I can't really tell you what pleasure it is to walk through the data centers and see the same stuff in rack after rack. Have one POC for all the Cisco gear, and one for all the EMC gear.

I was a big proponent of the hacked together environment because it works well when you have to be frugal. When you have the resources to just buy the technology needed to support the business adequately then it's just awesome to just deal with a couple vendors and that's that.

In addition, if my storage engineers all die in the same plane crash it's not an issue because I can just call EMC professional services and they will hop right it. That type of risk mitigation alone let's me sleep at night.

It didn't occur to me to ask questions about the "unifiedness" of the environment during recruitment, but I recommend to anyone who's looking to switch jobs to bring that up at some point during the discussion. The unified environment makes managing it (even from a administrative manager position) oh so much easier. Of course the guys who are working with it love it too!

 

[Eulogy]

Hah! I know pretty much exactly what you mean. I recently changed jobs as well. I went from a place that was essentially the polar opposite of "unified" to one that I would say is 90% unified on computer, 90% unified on storage and just shy of 100% on network.
Like you, it never once occured to me to ask how unified this place is. My experience has always been hacked together or worse setups, so I started to feel that's just how it was. Now that my eyes have been opened, I'm not sure I can comfortably move back to a mess.
The best part for me is, we're not only that much unified, but we're moving to a new DC as well, so where a lot of it is being built out net-new, so we can more adhere to best practices.

 

[feffrey]

I just left a small edu for private sector at a fortune 50 global company and it is interesting to say the least. There are so many projects and systems I'm working on I'll never be bored.
Many things are for sure better than edu but there are still a lot of issues and problems. Some systems don't seem to be implemented as they should be for a global enterprise.
For example there is no wmware (or virtualization) team. Instead vmware is co-owned by a couple teams. Not to mention that some sites run their own clusters and vcenters too for extra fun.
But they do at least realize that is a problem, so there is a team planning for building a dedicated vmware team.
Unification is interesting as long as it is good hardware and implemented the right way

 

[Thuleman]

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of things which are not anywhere near-perfect at my new employer. Show me an IT shop that's not constantly behind on something, or everything.

The problem that I have seen throughout my career is that because IT often doesn't have much exposure there isn't enough capacity planning done when it comes to what IT can actually accomplish within one reporting period.

I have some resources which are over-committed by more than 1,000% (yes, one thousand!) for Q1 2015. No idea how that happened, now I need to sort it out.

Whether a dedicated virtualization team is a good thing I don't know. Where I am currently at the compute & storage team owns the virtualization platforms. We run VMware for servers, and Citrix on the VDI side.

I guess it depends on the size of the organization whether a dedicated virtualization team makes sense. In our case it is definitely better to have the same team be in charge of the hardware as well as the virtual environment. We don't change hardware outside of two annual maintenance/refresh windows. Our hardware capacity planning and demand growth is such that we can get away with dedicating two weeks twice a year to deal with hardware changes. IT operations projects are so well planned that I am nothing but surprised how less than optimal human resource planning is on the business projects side.