IT Experiences Episode I

When I started at my last position, the company was so frustrated with the infrastructure and IT team, as systems were down weekly. From their perspective and understandably, they couldn't rely on the solutions provided and needed to do business.

On our end, the IT team was frustrated and blamed the vendor.

VMware hosts were failing frequently and the root cause was that the system boards on the servers were failing. Of course IBM stood behind their product warranty and replaced them. This meant we were down for several hours awaiting a replacement part.

I questioned, why is the system board failing so often? There must have been something causing this failure.

After doing to reading on the design and options, I found that when the system was purchased someone decided to select lower end fans for cooling. After the company suffering for over a year, I resolved the issue by simply replacing the fans with higher speeds, costing $300.

Lesson to be learned is, when providing a solution, it's important to measure risk on the proposal and help the business understand what possibly is the result of purchasing less than suggested hardware or solution. Understandably companies want to cut costs, but sometimes saving pennies cost thousands in productivity.