On Tuesday, June 17, 2008, at the HP Technology Forum and Expo in Las Vegas, Nev., Adaptive Infrastructure Consultant for HP, Russ Wagner, presented the introductory breakout session on Strategies and Best Practices for Constrained Data Centers. He emphasized the importance of bridging the gap and breaking down the silos between data center administrators and facility managers — especially in any discussion involving transforming an existing data center or designing new facilities.

Wagner suggested that those facilities guys have a “bit” of experience and knowledge in important things like Ohm’s law, the three power phases, the pros and cons of low voltage versus high voltage power supplies, and the all important conversion factor from BTU to Watts. They also may know a thing or two about industry standards such as NFPA 75, International Electrotechnical Commission standards, National Electrical Manufacturers Association standards, or BICSI cabling standards. Facility managers also will have familiarity with complex cooling standards, facility weather dynamics, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD).

Getting the facility folks in the mix is important when considering a new data center, but considering the knowledge and codified industry standards that are available through key organizations including the Uptime Institute, American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), and the United States Green Building Council are also important. Membership in AFCOM was also suggested as a great way for data center personnel to share their knowledge and experience, and a great way for new entrants to the data center to learn from those who have been there and done that. He also suggested that data center managers and operators get involved in the Sustainable IT (aka Green IT) movement. Examples of this include The Green Grid, Climate Savers Computing, and the EPA Energy Star program for servers.

One of the main reasons that Wagner suggested involvement in and edification about these programs is because of the the critical resource constraints in data centers beyond the obvious power and space constraints, is experienced people. This is such a pertinent and timely issue, it was the topic of an article in the same day’s publication of The New York Times, “Demand for Data Puts Engineers in Spotlight.” The aging workforce that has worked in the evolving data centers of the past and learned the lessons is getting ready for retirement, said Wagner. This leaves a knowledge gap, and the best thing that older workers nearing the retirement point can do is join the organizations and help drive standards and information. The best thing that new entrants can do is learn from these sources of information. Together, these measures can help alleviate the big picture data center asset constraints.

Long relegated to the dungeons of the IT world, hidden in dark rooms and tinkering with facility equipment, the data center facility manager is now becoming more wanted, and harder-to-find.

As the New York Times puts in its article, data center facility managers were often thought of as “blue-collar workers in the high-tech world.” Really, though, that hasn’t changed much. There is much of that blue-collar attitude among data center facility managers that often comes from their penchant for tinkering. That’s why many of them became engineers in the first place, because they like tinkering.

But now those engineering skills, combined with the ability to understand information technology, has become a much-vaunted skill set that isn’t always easy to find. The article quotes Chris Crosby, a senior VP at Digital Realty Trust, as saying that it takes the data center real estate company eight months to find a suitable data center manager. It’s not easy.

The story also mentions that the lucky ones with these skills now have the supply-and-demand equation on their side. Supply is low, demand is high. And so they can command six-figure salaries easily, as well as five-figure signing bonuses and other perks, according to the article.

Hmm, maybe I should start taking some engineering classes at night. Just kidding. Kidding that I’m kidding, that is.

The people I speak with about virtualization projects always list the same reasons for going virtual; they don’t have enough space in their data center to add more physical servers, they can’t afford power and cooling bills, they want to consolidate physical machines, and they want to consolidate physical people.

That’s right; the majority of people I speak with - employers and employees alike - say nonchalantly that they deploy virtual machines to avoid deploying more IT staff. While this is great for corporations, it doesn’t sound so good for IT job seekers.

A few examples; I went to a VMware Inc. User Group meeting in Boston on March 27, and one user gave a presentation about the virtualization project he oversaw at the paper manufacturing company called SAPPi in Maine.

“One reason we wanted to virtualize is we needed to lower our IT headcount. We needed to get rid of high end support and just keep desktop support,” the systems engineer/presenter said.

Similarly, at the growing law firm Owen Bird Law Corp. in Vancouver, British Columbia, Stephen Bakerman, the sole IT staffer, went with Virtual Iron virtualization to avoid adding more physical servers and having to hire more staff to help him manage it all.

“The cost savings is probably $100,000, and the time savings for me are incredible. Once everything is virtualized, I can run everything from my desktop remotely from my office or at home. I don’t have to hire someone else, and I would have if we kept adding servers,” Bakerman said.

Another company called QualComm Inc virtualized 60% of its data center environment and saw a similar side effect. At the VMware Virtualization Seminar Series in Providence, RI Feb 26, VMware presented a case study of the wireless technology company showing how it started with 1,200 servers and consolidated down to 100 (12:1 ratio) physical servers, increasing data center space and cutting back on power and cooling. That’s great. And the cherry on top? They have not had to increase their IT staff at all in 2.5 years.

Sure, I get how cool virtualization is, and the benefits it brings from a savings and management stand-point, but is anyone else concerned those IT college kids who dream of days spent engineering systems won’t be able to find a job? or is anyone worried about those system administrators who might get consolidated from many to few along with their servers?

I’m interested in hearing from IT folks; is virtualization leading to a virtual job market?

It’s not often we see malevolent, movie-type plots played out in IT departments, so check this out: Reuters reported that a computer systems administrator was sentenced to 30 months in prison Jan. 8 for trying to sabotage his company’s servers out of fear he was about to lose his job — the longest ever federal prison term for a criminal attempt to damage a computer system.

The former sysadmin was also ordered to pay $81,200 in restitution to his former employer, pharmacy benefit manager Medco Health Solutions Inc.

According to a report from the U.S. Department of Justice, Medco administered prescription benefit plans and maintained customer healthcare information on databases using an HP-Unix computer 2 system comprised of approximately 70 servers. The servers also included corporate financials, pharmacy maintenance tracking, web and pharmacy statistics reporting, and the employee payroll input.

As a system administrator, Lin had access to the Medco servers to perform maintenance and run applications.

The 51-year-old Unix pro admitted he modified computer codes and added code to create a “logic bomb” designed to wipe out servers on Medco’s network in October 2003, reports said.

At the time, Medco was restructuring and Lin reportedly feared he might be affected by layoffs.

A vindictive Lin modified and inserted code into pre-existing scripts on the Medco Servers designed to to delete nearly all of the information on those servers. The “Destructive Code” was designed to delete information including databases identifying subscribers, plan coverage, prescription administration, and billing data on his birthday, April 23, 2004.

But on October 6, 2003, Medco laid off four system administrators in the Unix group, but — get this — Lin was not one of them.

But he didn’t let a little good news get in the way of his plot. He left it in place, but the code failed to deploy as planned, so he edited it to go off on his birthday the following year, 2005.

Lucky for Medco, the unauthorized code was discovered by another computer administrator in January 2005.

All joking aside, this is really disturbing, not only because Lin took advantage of his power, but because clearly he didn’t consider all of Medco’s patients whose prescription information would be lost, and the potential harm he was doing not only to “the corporate machine” but to actual people.

Reports show that employee misconduct and unintentional actions like errors and omissions are the greatest cause of data security breaches, so I hope companies like Medco do some serious screenings for criminal minds before hiring people who will have access to our personal data.

Ziff Davis recently performed a survey, sponsored by Symantec Corp., of almost 900 data center managers and found that data centers are understaffed and overworked, and are having a hard time finding qualified workers.

There were many other findings in the study, which Symantec announced this week. But here’s what caught my eye:

• 52% of respondents report their data centers are currently understaffed;
• 86% of respondents have difficulty finding qualified applicants; and
• 68% report staffing is challenging because data centers are too complex to manage.

So what makes for a qualified data center employee? I think it requires a range of IT and facilities knowledge that just doesn’t exist too often out there. It’s a combination of hardware, software, and facilities engineering know-how. That’s not to say that people can’t find their niche within an organization, but unless you’re in a large enterprise company with plenty of data center resources, you often have to be a jack of all trades, and that’s tough.
I think that is recognized in the survey, with 68% saying data centers are too complex to manage. They have become these intricate environments with their own ecologies, and it’s just hard for a lot of companies to keep up with that.

In a trend reversal that first emerged in late 2000, salaries for noncertified IT workers now average more than pay for workers with IT certifications, according to Foote Partners’ quarterly IT Skills and Certifications Pay Index, which monitors salaries of 74,000 IT professionals in the U.S. and Canada.

“The corner has officially been turned for IT professionals who choose to market the diversity of their talents, not just their technical skills,” said the 23-page report by Foote Partners, a Vero Beach, Fla.-based IT workforce research firm.

“IT jobs have changed substantially in eight years. In another few decades, the IT organization as we know it today will be hard to find, and so will entire segments of IT jobs. The hurt that has been put on the marketplace reputation of skill certifications is only a drop in the pond of fundamental changes that will reform or destroy dozens of long-held IT industry conventions, beliefs and rituals,” said the firm’s co-founder, CEO and Chief Research Officer David Foote in a statement.

On a more extreme note, I recently wrote about an analyst who said IT department jobs may one day be obsolete because users are becoming more self-reliant.

While I don’t agree with this prediction, it is clear that the scope of IT careers is changing. It seems the biggest issue now is whether students who earn degrees in computer science are learning skills that translate into real-world data center jobs.

For instance, 29-year-old Aaron Sawchuk, CTO of Marlborough, Mass.-based ColoSpace explained how he went to Middlebury College in Vermont with the intention of earning a degree in computer science but switched his major to economics because his studies didn’t pertain to relevant technologies. The IT skills he needed to found ColoSpace he learned on his own.

According to a report from the American Electronics Association (AeA), 118,500 jobs were added to the U.S. high-tech industry between January and June of 2007, bringing the total to 5.94 million jobs. Even so, there is a clear shortage of skilled IT workers to fill those openings.

I am interested in hearing from IT staffers about computer science education. Are today’s college courses relevant to the technologies actually used in today’s data center, or did you feel like a deer in the headlights at your first data center job? If you didn’t go to school to learn your trade, how did you learn? What advice would you give a young person considering a career in IT? Leave a comment here, or send me an email.

I recently wrote a story about the state of high-tech jobs, which was based on a study by the high-tech industry lobbying group AeA. In this article, questions about how to advance the high-tech job market (in effect, the high-tech industry) were raised. Some experts argue that there is a skills shortage and that is at least one of the reasons the U.S. high-tech industry isn’t as good as it could be. SearchDataCenter.com readers were kind enough to send us some feedback about this article and share their insights. As always, let us know what you think by commenting on this blog, or send me an email to have your say.

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I liked your article but you should make clear the bias of your sources. The title makes it sound like there is a high tech skills shortage, which is a canard circulated by lobbying groups such as the AeA. The AeA mission statement says they are dedicated to the bottom line of their member companies, not to any kind of truth in journalism. Take your pick.The reality is: there is only a shortage of skilled workers willing to work long hours for peanuts and no benefits. There are millions of highly trained workers who will gladly work for a middle class salary and benefits.

You could improve your reporting by saying something like “Lobbying group claims skilled worker shortage” and possibly explain to your readers that although studies have shown there is no skilled worker shortage, hi-tech employers would like to replace their expensive American workers with cheaper foreign workers.

Sincerely,

J.M.

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Adam, please take a quick look at this blog, BLS-OES and NSF educational data — easy read about 1 1/2 pages.Post: Myth: Labor Shortage in Computer and Math

Link: http://immigration-weaver.blogspot.com/2007/10/myth-labor-shortage-in-computer-and.html

Regards,

S.K.

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A.’Archey believes that, at least for the moment, authorizing more non-citizens to fill high-tech positions would be a step in the right direction. “Policy makers currently need to reform U.S. high-skilled visa policy. We should be attracting, not shunning, the best and brightest talent from around the world, either through temporary H-1B visas or permanent employment-based green cards. Instead, the United States places arbitrary caps on H-1Bs and imposes a time-consuming, bureaucratic process on obtaining green cards.”‘

We have been saying that for 40 years now. At some point you have to realize that giving a heroin addict more heroin is not a reasonable stopgap solution.

B.

The implication that the H-1B program attracts “the best and brightest\talent from around the world” is laughable: http://www.cis.org/articles/2007/back407.html.

The data for Green cards is not much better. Still to be published.

jmm