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Random Work Sample - Server Consolidation/Virtualization July 7, 2006


For whatever reasons, I’ve explained to a few people the last couple of days “what I do”. Or at least, I’ve tried to! That made me think of a piece of work I did a few days back, and I thought I’d throw it up here.

What I do, mostly, is manage technologists, engineers and so forth, and act as the man in the middle (I was going to say “interface”, but let’s not play “Bingo!” today…) between the pure technical folks, and the pure business folks.

Wearing that hat, I was having a conversation with a former colleague who’s taken on a new role with a different company. One of the first things he’s been asked to do is deploy virtual servers, thus consolidating servers. My first question to him was “Why?”. Not implying that this was a bad road to be going down, just that there had to be a “why” behind it, and that understanding that was going to be important to deliver the “how” properly. We talked it through - and yes, we partook of a couple of cold adult beverages at the same time! - and I ran through a sample of the kind of questions I’d be asking if I was in his shoes. The attached is a representation of that. For what it’s worth, it took me about ten or fifteen minutes to generate in MindJet MindManager, and then another couple to export to PDF, Word and PowerPoint format (I’m working with the MS Office 2007 Beta, and I wanted to make sure that my colleague could read at least one document that I sent him!).

If you’re looking at the document, it’d be useful to keep this in mind - this is a very high-level view, with the intent of prompting discussion. It’s by no means an indepth technical plan, assessment, or such, and nor is it complete. But it’s a starter.

If you want the actual Mindmap, you can download it here.

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