I have had a little experience with this. When setting things up you will have to fly your people out there to do that work. Then arrange with the datacenter for them to be your "remote hands" if you need an Oracle CD put in or something powercycled. Make sure all your servers have support, for example with Sun silver support with an uplift. So if something breaks a Sun engineer can run out there and swap the part within four hours if need be. The people at AT&T or whereever will be there to let them in.
Your ops people will do a lot of travel while you get everything setup. You might need more staff just because of the additional hardware and overhead. So I guess what I'm saying is that yes, you can remotely monitor and operate the machines with the help of the datacenter and your vendors. The only thing you can't do is rack, stack, and plug shit in. So when everyone gets burned out from flying back and forth from coast to coast you might find it handy to hire a single person to do installs and stuff. Everything from hooking up new machines to little stuff like getting serial numbers off of the backs of the machines. Colo's charge for little stuff like that. Also if you have clients or other business units that have a stake in what services these machines are running it's also handy to have a live human there to talk to them and explain what happened, is happening, or is going to happen. When we used to manage client sites at remote datacenters we would set them up with the west coast crew and then look for someone local to hire as a "client engineer". That one person was usually enough to take care of things if a disk blew and we didn't have support or other things out of left field like that. -e On Tue, 24 Jun 2003, P a u l Guth wrote: > Greetings. > > I'm wrestling with a decision and I'm hoping you guys can provide > me with some relevant experience. I'm assuming some of you have > worked places with lots of servers in colos. If you haven't you > don't need to read the rest of this. > > We are going to be moving to a bicoastal datacenter setup. The > decision we need to make is whether to staff bicoastally as well. > > We currently have a DC (colocated) in santa clara with about 100 > machines in it. We'll be building a similar setup in an east coast > datacenter. > > There are currently 3 Network Operations folks who watch over the > system, but the security guy and the director of netops are also in > the oncall rotation. Plans are to hire 3 more netops folks by the > time the second DC is live. The question is: do we keep this > new staff here on the west coast? Or do we hire on the east coast? > > I'm interested in hearing any experiences of small ops organizations > (less than 15 people) supporting bicoastal datacenters. How were > they organized? Did it work? > > I'm also interested in experiences with larger organizations, and > in your opinions on the matter even if you have no relevant > experience. > > Thanks. > ___________________________________________________________________ > P a u l > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > _______________________________________________ > Bits mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://www.sugoi.org/mailman/listinfo/bits > _______________________________________________ Bits mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sugoi.org/mailman/listinfo/bits
