Intel Open Port: IT@Intel Blog : 2008 : April

Server Management...The Easy Way

Posted by BrianMcCann Apr 4, 2008

Hello community,

Since this is my first blog on this site so I thought it would be nice to introduce myself. My name is Brian McCann and I'm an Automation Engineer at Intel that focuses on platforms support. In short this means I'm in the trenches everyday supporting Intel's manufacturing environment. This blog is going to be focused on sharing my tools and best practices when managing a server environment, it is not going to be a sales and marketing blog...sorry to disappoint. My interests are hardware and software...in fact I'm a little biased toward Microsoft since I've supported Microsoft environments for some time now. If you want to find out a little more about me feel free to visit my other blog where I focus most of those blogs on Active Directory. Hopefully you'll like what you see here and come back for more.

Today I wanted to share with you a tool that will help simplify the management of your servers...especially if you have a lot of servers to manage like I do. Its name is VisionApp Remote Desktop and it is a great freeware program to manage Windows servers. I've always disliked the built-in MMC snap-in Remote Desktops. It is a very simple tool that is only good for managing about ten servers. Like you, I manage way more than ten servers. This tool has the following benefits to help you manage those remote desktop sessions:

Sort Servers Alphabetically (This made me so angry that I couldn't do this with Microsoft's Remote Desktop MMC. When you have to manage a lot of servers it is a pain when you add new ones that follow a naming convention that now fall out of order)
Create folders to help sort different types of servers (I created folders for my Production, Integration, Development and Virtual servers. This has made it extremely easy to find what I'm looking for.)
Tabbed Remote Desktops (Tabs are huge right now and this tool takes full advantage of them. I can now open several different types of servers from different folders and access them via the tabs on the top.)

Hopefully this tool relieves some of the stress you have when managing your environment. I have plenty of tools and best practices stored up so let me know what you think about them. Also if you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask.

1 Comments Permalink Tags: servers, server_management, remote_desktop, tools, best_practices, brian_mccann

What if you invested a dollar and it returned 10?

Posted by Doug Garday Apr 1, 2008

If you invested one dollar and it returned 10 dollars, you'd think that was an excellent return wouldn't you? So what if you could get this same 10X return on energy? An industrial heat pump system called Heat Recovery where an additional 100 kW of power used returns 1 megawatt of heat energy.

This return or ratio of energy in vs energy out is called Coefficient Of Performance (COP). A resistance heater uses 1kW of power to produce 1kW of heat, providing a COP of 1. Residential Heat Pumps are efficient but very dependent on ambient weather conditions and produce less usable heat when outside conditions are colder. So how about a system that works at a COP of 10 regardless of weather conditions outside?

I hope you have seen our discussion on whether the data center is green or efficient Greening Data Centers or Make 'em Efficient? but either way you slice it the data center consumes energy. How can we reuse that energy for other purposes? Check out Part 1 of a two-part podcast (look for this next week) that describes how we have designed a system to capture the heat coming off all the equipment in the data center and recycle it to heat offices and warm water for cafeterias and other domestic water purposes.

Check out the brief for more details Data Center Heat Recovery Helps Intel Create Green Facility.
Update: Part II of the podcast series is now available Part II: What if you invested a dollar and it returned 10? This is where I get into discussing the numbers and the total cost of ownership.

1 Comments Permalink Tags: power, green, data_center, data_center_cooling, heat_recovery, cop, data_center_power, energy_efficiency, energy

Using six sigma in IT

Posted by GeorgeClement Apr 1, 2008

Just finished my green belt project analyzing how effective web analytics is in identifying applications no longer required by IT (and should be archived) . the project went well I had some interesting data to show for it and it def drove a decision.

I'd have to say that LSS gave me some new tools to use. The templates we use internally are ok but If I was outside I'd probably stop by http://lssacademy.com/downloads/ and check out their C&E and FMEA.

Some advice to others looking to start a GB project I'd like to mention a couple of general things I learned from setting up and running mine:

Don't boil the ocean - Improve an existing process as your green belt project.
Use Six Sigma tools to measure process output and identify where failures impact results (FMEA, C&E, etc).
Apply Lean Thinking to a step that has a lot of failure.
Measure improvement using Six Sigma tools (remesure your failure rate / speed / or what every you has as the cause of your failure).