In the mid 80’s I had the opportunity to work with Arnold Farber and Rosemary LaChance of a company known as Farber/LaChance. They preached the gospel of lights out operations, without any staffing. Fast forward nearly 30 years, and www.farberlachance.com doesn’t have an owner (as of March 28, 2012.)
The truth is I don’t know what happened to Arnold and Rosemary, and hope they are blissfully retired somewhere. As I look at data centers, who is really doing lights out operations?
It’s my observation small and medium business’ are often running lights out….with someone getting a text message if something fails. These are not sophisticated operations; if power is lost the text system often fails. These are operations where automation supports the business, and isn’t mission critical.
In larger organizations, staffed operations centers remain the norm. Why?
Back in the mid-80s, we were worried about running batch jobs at the right time, or making sure the printouts got produced. Scheduling, Tape Management and Report Distribution were pretty hot back in the day. Heck, some people were even getting press coverage.
Our CFO was not amused with Computerworld’s choice of quote.
Thinking about today, large data centers have made great process with reliability, monitoring, correlation, scheduling, backup management, replication, etc. Many keep all but a handful of people out of the data center (system admins get upset when they can’t be in the machine room…and the truth is they don’t need to be there.) And still, people are often in place. Why?
Ultimately people make decisions. People are pretty good correlation engines.
It’s people who open the data center doors for repair people. People who run the incident bridges.
And in the end, for a company with mission critical systems, having a small cadre of people is very inexpensive insurance.
So it’s about the criticality of the systems to the business.
I thank Arnold and Rosemary for their contributions in pushing forth with the vision. Their vision is still valid, as we couldn’t run the highly complex environments of today without automation. As a discipline, we still have progress we can make.
What automation efforts are you doing leading to lights out? How close is your business to true lights out operation?