On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 8:25 PM, Derek J. Balling<[email protected]> wrote: > We recently had a meeting between our data-center operations folks and > our bean-counters. The long and the short of it was, for companies > where they have SOX compliance to deal with, etc., etc., how granular > are other people getting on their asset tracking. > > For example,... > > - When you upgrade a server from 16GB to 32GB, does accounting get > notified that the valuation of the server has changed for depreciation > purposes? When you swap out the 146G hard drives for 300G hard > drives, is there any accounting controls you enforce for that type of > action?
At previous $employer we sort of did this with RAM and CPU upgrades but only if the total cost of the upgrade exceeded some threshold (and generally that threshold was determine by finance and whether they considered it a capital or expense purchase). So, upgrading one system wouldn't have mattered. Upgrading a thousand would have because you were talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars. > > - Is there anyone who is ACTUALLY tracking their hard drives and > individual DIMMs through their enterprise, even if they were bought > separately later as an upgrade to an existing piece of hardware? > Without an extremely good inventory system, you'd be hard pressed to do this. > - What do you do when you take that 16GB out of the server above and > toss it on a shelf as being obsolete? Does accounting ever know? or > care? I wouldn't. By that point it's likely fully depreciated. Accounting really only cared about the purchase as a whole. They wanted to know that we still had 1000 systems from purchase X, not what the current configuration was. > > - Do you bother to tell accounting when $VENDOR comes out and swaps > out a motherboard, changing the serial number of the hardware in the > process? (and yes, for some vendors, a replacement motherboard DOES > change the serial number). If you don't, doesn't that really hamper > the ability to audit the asset tracking when asset ID # N used to > belong to S/N XXXXXXX and now belongs to S/N YYYYYYY? > Nope. Even if the serial number changed, chances are that if we were tracking it in the global asset system, there was a company specific asset tag associated with that piece of hardware so there was no need to. > - Do you tell accounting when you ship hardware from one colo facility > to another? I think we had to do this more so with our Global Trade group than we did with accounting (and only if something went outside of US borders). > > We're trying to define our policies and controls in this area, and it > seems far-too-easy to get lost in the weeds of "what someone MIGHT > have wanted you to do", when there's probably some, much easier, "what > most people are doing" types of practices. > > Any thoughts, comments, suggestions, from folks who've been down this > road before? Whatever policies you come up with, look at the size of your current environment and say, "How will these policies work if our size goes up an order of magnitude or more?" Seemingly simple policies for small environments can become inordinately bizarre and complex the moment you go from 100 to 1000 or 1000 to 10000 systems tracked. Travis -- Travis Campbell [email protected] _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
