When you ask customers what keeps them up at night, the answer, most likely, is the risk of a production outage. Risks such as single points of failure, limited personnel, lack of documentation, back level software, and equipment older than a middle schooler also lead to stress and worry.
So how do you lower the volume on the alarm bells that wake you up at 2 in the morning? Replacing old equipment with new hardware and upgrading unsupported software so that it doesn’t misbehave in the middle of your batch run every night are good places to start. Once those symptoms are treated, it’s time to look at whether your processes fit your current business needs.
There are 2 sentences that can be a datacenter’s last words: “We’ve never done it that way before” and “We’ve always done it this way.” Humans don’t like change, so much so that change management is in and of itself a profession. However as technology has evolved, so have best practices, and once you get over the hump, the newer, faster, sleeker datacenter will to support the business in ways it never has before.
Does this kind of transformation sound like too much to add to all of your other initiatives? There is a solution to that. Managed Services from IBM. IBM’s spectrum of Managed Services includes Infrastructure, Network, Business Resiliency, Mobility and Security. Working with customers across industries and datacenter size boundaries IBM can help with hardware and software upgrades and introduce best practices for automation, operations procedures, high availability, batch job processing, DR documentation and testing, just to name a few.
Working with Mainline and IBM we can help you optimize your environment to best fulfill your business and technology initiatives, then we’ll put together a plan to get your data center running at peak efficiency and low risk. Leaving the day to day management to IBM Managed Services will help you avoid missteps that lead to further lost sleep and bleary-eyed days!
Please contact your Mainline Account Executive directly, or click here to contact us with any questions.