Kevin Mullins

Resignation over corporate uncertainty

One of my top administrators resigned a couple of weeks ago and left this week. The reason that he gave for leaving was lack of job security and uncertainty due to sale of the company. He hit the job market and quickly found and accepted a new position with a raise and a promise of growth and stability. Another member of my staff appears to be in the same position. Although he has not officially stated this to me, he has had a number of doctors and dentist appointments over the last few weeks and my feeling is that he will not be staying.

It's hard to motivate folks to stay thru this period of transition when there is so much uncertainty surrounding their positions. It's fairly easy for the younger guys and girls to land new positions. New opportunities can be very attractive and make a reasonable case for leaving, especially when the younger folks are in the lower end of the salary scale, and have gained more experience and a stronger skill set. Good folks are always looking to grow and usually grow out of the position that they are in.

As a manager, it's my job to help my folks thru these decisions. We all come from different backgrounds and different circumstances, however one truth that I believe in is, you need to be comfortable with your job and you should and enjoy your job, and if that is not the case, then you should try and find a position that you do enjoy.

As these stronger employees grow and eventually move on, I look at it with a sense of endorsement and regret.

Take Care Jim ......

Technorati : Management

Microsoft's Virtual Lab Express

I came across a great free resource that could really benefit folks supporting a Microsoft based infrastructure. Microsoft's Virtual Lab Express is an easy way to try out Microsoft products in a Virtual Lab environment, which provides an environment that allows folks gain experience or a better understanding of Microsoft products and tools.

You need to register and install the Virtual Machine Remote Control ActiveX Client, however it installs in about a minute without the need for a reboot. The module I downloaded took about 3 minutes to download, however once the download completed I was connected to a Virtual Server Session via my browser. There is no need to login as I was connected to a Virtual Desktop, which was great as all of the software components for the Lab are already installed.

I connected to the "Introduction to Windows Server 2003 Management" lab and quickly realized that there was a virtual domain controller, virtual MS SQL server and other devices connected to this Virtual Lab. I was able to step thru making a Global Policy change in this Virtual environment, and although it was an isolated environment, you can see the benefit that an environment like this could be for large organizations.

There were many other Virtual Labs offered at the Technet Site including the following:

Windows PowerShell Virtual Lab , Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 ,

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Virtual Labs , Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005

I heard about the Labs this past week while listening to the "In the Trenches" podcast. I found these labs interesting and a good value to those folks supporting Microsoft environments. I would recommend checking out both the Microsoft's Virtual Lab Express site and the "In the Trenches" site and podcast.

Technorati : Microsoft, System Administration, virtualization

Healthcare and technology

Working in Healthcare, you quickly realize that there are few adoptions of bleeding edge or newer technologies, instead we are lucky to have and deploy three year old technologies and strategies. We recently deployed a virtualization strategy that was piggy-backed on a Blade purchase. The Blade purchase was approved in 2005 for 2006 and we were allocated limited funds for a Blade chassis that would be populated with 6 or 7 servers.

After researching our options in early 2006, we realized that many folks were using Virtualization on Blade technology and we started looking at Virtualization solutions. We compared both Microsoft Virtual Server and VMWare ESX server and found the VMWare product to be the better product. We quickly realized the VMWare's ESX server was very stable and deployable, and we proceeded to spend funds allocated for the Blade project on virtualization.

We quickly realized that it was more cost efficient to deploy the VMWare 2 CPU licenses on a robust standalone server with alot of memory, than on a Blade server with limited memory and disk capacity. You can deploy more Virtual servers on a beefy server with 16 or 32 gigs of ram than you can on a Blade server with 8 to 16 gigs of ram. We proved the merits of VMWare from a cost perspective and a deployment perspective and expanded our resources in that area.

This deployment could not have happened if we did not have the Blade funds, however one thing that I have learned is that sometimes you need to be creative to get your job done. We spent more on Virtualization by spending less on the Blade infrastructure and in the long run this benefited the company.

Technorati : Management, virtualization, vmware

Good Management Decisions

If you read my earlier posts Changes at Work and Managing through change, then you know that we have just completed a change in ownership at work and tensions are high. This week was a little better than last management communicated well and made every attempt to address the fears of the organization.

Our new senior management became aware that the decision to move our production computing environments to their current data center in another state had been communicated to the masses and this prompted a set of meetings to try and calm the folks down and communicate their intentions. For the most part, Senior management succeeded in calming the folks down, however some of us are still skeptical.

Our CIO pulled together a meeting of all managers and directors to discuss the impact and to try and alleviate any fears. This was a good move and I would have done the same thing, however it was obvious to most of us, that our CIO is not in the new senior management decision making process, and that has some of us concerned. Our CIO let us know that the new Senior Management team would be onsite the following day to speak with all IT folks. This was a good move and really calmed down my staff.

Senior Management let us know that they had hoped that the long term strategy for the production environments could have been communicated differently with an emphasis on the actual deployment timeframe along with a resource impact statement. They stated that their staff was just beginning our Integration planning process and that we would be involved in that, however the new team was still in the process of integrating a company that they acquired 2004 and they were concentrating their efforts on completing the 2004 integration.

They emphasized that the timeframe for most of the migrations to another data center would be 12 to 18 months and they need us for the migration and support after the migration. Their support strategy was to perform remote support from our facility to their facility. With the right infrastructure (network, kvm, monitoring tools) this is certainly possible.

I was pleasantly surprised to see how genuine they appeared. There were no airs about them and there was no spin. They answered all questions and spoke easily and openly. This meeting relieved some of my fears, and now I feel comfortable that I will have a job in January, however I am still skeptical about my long term future with this company.

Technorati : Management

Oracle's Linux Strategy illustrates Oracles Power in Marketplace

At Oracle World last month, Chief Executive Larry Ellison told thousands of attendees at the Oracle OpenWorld conference last week, "If you are a Red Hat support customer, you can very easily switch from Red Hat support to Oracle support." as reported by CNET. This story has generated a lot of controversy in the Linux camps of the world, and is one of the top story's on digg and Linux Watch.

This direction illustrates the power that Oracle has in the Marketplace. Oracle is doing this to ensure another stable platform for its products, however it comes at the cost of RedHat. How would you feel if you were a developer at RedHat or a contributer to the RedHat distribution. I think one strategy that Oracle could take would be to add resources to both the RedHat and Oracle-Customized RedHat distributions. Oracle could and probably will reduce their Licensing structure for Linux based products in an effort to drive adoption to Linux.

Someone who is in favor of this new Oracle strategy is Dana Gardner at ZDNET who wrote ...

"If Oracle can subsidize the offering of subscription services to an acceptable and open (not too forked) Linux distribution (and these need to happen) through its commercial products' revenues, it will. It was okay for open source service providers to undercut Unix and Windows via their low-cost development and distribution means, right? What's good for the goose …" Follow this link for the complete article

Will current customers really move to Linux ?

For larger Enterprises with Oracle databases, this path needs to be cost effective and supportable. Oracle is trying to bring some credibility to the support side of its products on RedHat, and this may be an good strategy, if they really can provide the support. From a cost perspective, it is almost an even comparison of Hardware and OS choices. You still need to purchase RedHat and a support contract for your products. Hardware cost of Database Platform Intel based servers and Sun Servers are very similar.

So, in my opinion, there is not a compelling reason for Large Enterprise Organizations to move your production database structures to Linux, however this could be a nice strategy for Small and Medium sized businesses.

Technorati : Infrastructure, System Administration

New Browser and Cool Site

I have been focusing on work a little more lately, however I did come across a new site and a new browser that I think you should check out. I heard about the browser and the site from the guys at the The Best Damn Tech Show .

The browser is called Flock and it is more of a social browser than Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox. It really intergrates news, rss, and photos and browsing into a community like experience. What I really like about it is the RSS reader that is built into the Browser. It allows you to preview multiple posts, from different feeds, within the same window, enabling you to look at the most recent posts and select that posts that are of interest. Drew Olanoff interviewed Geoffrey Arone, one of the founders of Flock and after listening, I was intrigued enough to go to Flock and download the browser. Although Flock has many capabilities that I did not mention, it is a great little browser and has become my default RSS feed browser.

The second site that I would like to share with you is www.goowy.com. Goowy is a site that allows you to look at Blogs, RSS Feeds, photos, music email and IM. It's a Web 2.0 "Yahoo" like portal that allows file sharing, mail and IM integration. It's a nice little environment for folks who use a lot of email and IM. Although I did not test this, my guess is that this site would be great for those that need IM behind a corporate firewall. Both Adam Plante and Drew Olanoff interviewed Goowy CEO Alex Bard and after listening to the interview, I visited that site and subscribed.

Check it out .....

Technorati : Blog, podcasts

Changes at work

I work in a mid sized Healthcare company with about 1400 employees. In April we were alerted to the fact that our current owners were putting the company up for sale. Our company has been in business for 26 years and the three primary owners were looking to sell.

There was some early discomfort with some projects getting canceled and others moving up in prioritization but there was not a lot of early change. We (my staff and I) spoke on many occasions about the future and we all decided to take a wait and see approach. In September the new owners were identified, however Federal Securities Laws prohibited the two companies from talking for 30 days. During this period, my staff and others were very uneasy and it took extra effort to continue to communicate effectively and keep our Production environments supported appropriately.

The 30 day period ended about 2 weeks ago and we were introduced to our new management team. It was a little disconcerting as the new management team read from prepared statements and did not appear that engaged. All members of our Senior Staff were released in an appropriate manner and they probably sailed out with a nice big severance.

Our new management communicated that together we were going to make a great team and their strategy was to take the Best of Breed Applications and Practices within each organization and merge them into one. They communicated that they were working on a 90 day plan that would identify the strategy for the future.

As we work toward our 90 day strategy, discussions surrounding our Production Applications have come up and it appears that the overall strategy will be to move all of our Production Applications to their datacenter, 4 states away. Now this has not been formally communicated from our new management, however the word got out and our internal management did a good job of getting in front of this strategy and communicated what they knew.

Internal Management did communicate that the long term strategy would be to have all the Production equipment in one facility, and that facility would not be our facility. They emphasized that this is a long term strategy and would take 6 to 12 months to accomplish, however it has become very clear to most of us that at some point, there will be layoffs and our overall headcount will be downsized by 75%.

This leads to a lot of speculation, poor moral and loss of productivity.

How do you try and maintain a stable support environment when everyone around you is distracted by the possibility of loosing your job ?

More to come ……