At work we've been negotiating a contract with a new datacentre provider (dcp). We're moving datacentres later this year! However, we are asking the dcp to provide us with a heck of a lot in terms of monthly, quarterly or annual reports.
The purpose of these reports is to ensure that anything that has changed was changed under the company change control procedure. And is known about. I was thinking that a lot of what we were asking for from the dcp could be generated by a tool like Tideway.
The ability/facility to identify the current configuration as a starting baseline and then track future changes at appropriate periods in the future is really what we're looking for. And judging by their client list it is what a number of other companies are after too.
Whilst in the current times, I understand that every company needs to have revenue to continue, I'm not sure that I think that Tideway's silver service is worth considering. It seems to me to be the sort of information that any IT dept. ought to be able to generate themselves with simple iterative scripts, ping and a knowledge of the networks in use.
The higher level of service provisions should be much more of interest to a company. Providing much more of the sort of information it would be difficult to associate together otherwise.
1 comment:
You are right that the higher levels of service provisions are more popular - our Gold packaged service (that gives you a server, OS and software inventory and various dependencies including software-to-software) is the one that most clients take. This information is very time consuming (and tedious!) to gather manually.
Whereas our Silver packaged service is a fairly basic offering - we offer it because some customers just want a really quick and painless server count.
You might be interested to see some of the stuff we're adding to the next release of the product, which provides even more useful information for planning/executing a data center migration. Specifically:
- The ability to automatically put servers into groups that talk to each other (so you can plan sets of servers to move at once without having to model the business applications)
- The automatic creation of 'server passports' - pdfs with everything there is to know about a specific server - one of our customers insists every server has a passport before it is moved, as a communication tool along the migration process.
We're still deciding where these capabilities will fit in our packaged service offerings.
Anyway - good luck with the move later this year - let us know if we can help!
Kosten Metreweli
Tideway
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