Eric Silva - SEPATON

When it comes to running IT Operations in a large multinational corporation for one of the world’s largest companies, your likely to have a large capital budget, but you still need to be careful with every dollar you spend. When you are tasked with supporting thousands of end users, multiple corporate databases, and basically anything with a plug in it, you have to spend your time and dollars wisely. Common sense tells you that IT budgets are the technologist’s precious gems. Implementing the right technology can make or break an IT department. When choosing a new platform or technology to bring in to your domain it’s a process that is much easier said than done.

IT professionals of large enterprises know they have to pay for top performance, but what is the right balance of performance, reliability and cost? Performance is paramount to meet SLAs and provide scalable IT resources to the organization. Often determining what a technology’s performance will be in your own production environment is difficult to ascertain. Performance is often not the same as the glossy data sheet or sales rep promises and it’s just as difficult to measure reliability. Reliability is critical in order to ensure continuous business services to your customer base. Cost is often the most critical component of the decision making process, if it’s too high you can’t purchase the technology your business needs. Sometimes with new technology, despite the best vendor evaluation process, you have to take a leap of faith. You may still have some doubts even after a proof of concept is passed with flying colors. You wonder if your new technology investment will run flawlessly for years and scale as your needs grow. A lot can happen to IT environments and IT staff as a system is stressed by the daily grind and an organization’s growth. Your limited supply of IT assets and resources can be quickly consumed by growing, seemingly uncontrolled, business demand.

Will your data protection tech vendor stand by their promises when you need them most?
It’s important to seek out the most cost effective, most scalable and most importantly, the most reliable disk based data protection available. Implementing and supporting technology is not an easy task, especially in larger enterprises. SEPATON understands the challenge IT professionals face every day and we stand side by side with them providing data protection their enterprises count on, each and every day. When it comes to spending your IT dollars wisely, SEPATON data protection becomes a matter of common sense. You don’t have to rely on your sixth sense.

In the more than 15 years I spent running IT operations for financial service firms, the biggest challenge I faced was a shortage of resources, specifically time. Yes, every now and then I had to fight for funding or the right tools to accomplish the job, but time was always running short.

The big problem that results from being short on time, though, can’t often be predicted. Let me give you a hypothetical: as the operations executive for a utilities company, I’m tasked to cover costs without raising prices. I don’t want to reduce the service to my customers, so I cut back on the summer road crews that perform preventative maintenance on the trees around my power lines. Reducing the operational expenses looks great on the bottom line, and you, my customer, don’t see any problem…until it snows.

Then, when things all go wrong at once, I’m in deep trouble. It takes days, even weeks to restore power to all of my customers, who are calling for my head. I look like an idiot for cutting the summer road crews back.

This metaphor is important because when it’s applied to IT, the road crew is your data protection. Of course your primary goal is to keep your production systems and users up and happy. But failing to plan for when things inevitably go wrong could result in an even bigger catastrophe than you’re imagining. Don’t let backup and restore maintenance fall down the priority list just because nobody is clamoring for tests today. If you don’t, they’ll certainly be clamoring for them when the office (and you) get hit with the unexpected.