The Data Center: IT's Halloween Fear Factory

Kong Yang
Learn more about SolarWinds

I was working in the data center, late one night
When my eyes beheld an eerie sight
For my infrastructure began to screech
And suddenly there was a breach …
 
Hey, it's Halloween, how could I not take advantage of the opportunity for a little IT-style "Monster Mash?"

The spookiest day of the year is here, and Halloween is actually a good reminder that trouble in the data center is always lurking just beneath the application surface, ready to wreak havoc at any moment.

So, in the spirit of Halloween, SolarWinds recently asked our THWACK community of IT professionals their deepest, darkest IT fears. While some are definitely good for a chuckle, and you'll probably just nod your head in agreement at others, the responses simply allude to the fact that in IT, if things can go wrong, they usually will, and how important it is to be prepared to address the many challenges that exist.

Here are a handful of the responses we got:

■ Stupidity. Yes, my number one fear is stupidity. Not mine, mind you, but others'. For example, I recently walked into a client's site and found a ton of power strips laying on the floor behind their telecom racks. It would have been so easy for someone to have simply tripped over one, unplugging it in the process. Doing so would have caused an outage to an entire manufacturing plant.

■ My greatest IT fear (and fear is general) is clowns on backhoes digging all around our facility looking for that undocumented fiber or twisted pair. (Shudder.)

■ My greatest fear is upper management not understanding the importance of redundancy. Our ERP system is at headquarters and all plants communicate with it almost nonstop for labels and shipping information to get product out. Having headquarters' WAN connection die and then needing to wait for hardware to arrive to replace it would bring business to a halt.

■ My leading fear is our monitoring software either taking an unscheduled dirt nap for some reason or otherwise becoming unavailable. Flying blind in this day and age is a scary proposition. It would indeed be a dark day.

■ Human error can be the worst nightmare of all. I've seen overly enthusiastic electricians and phone technicians cut lines they weren't supposed to.

■ Aside from my technological nightmares, my biggest fear is a server fan eating my beard. There are some devices out there (NexSAN SATABeast, anyone?) that have massive fans, and I've come close to being eaten alive a few times. Aside from the immediate pain, the call to support to get a replacement fan would be quite awkward...

■ My biggest fear? That a "new" and as of yet undetected vulnerability is wreaking havoc in my environment, letting bad guys take whatever data they want even as I write this … and that it then ends up on every news channel with our company logo big and bold.

■ Natural disasters are especially frightening to me as an IT professional, whether it be hurricanes, tornadoes or particularly earthquakes. I'm both curious (and not interested) in finding out the technological ramifications an earthquake would have in our data center and the subsequent ripple (no pun intended … OK, pun intended) effect throughout the organization. Not just server racks, but the smaller stuff, too, like all the creative ways an earthquake would kill spinning hard drives. (Though, if racks are just falling over, hard drives would probably be the least of our worries.)

■ I'm deathly afraid that there's ransomware living on some of our critical production and backup data without us knowing it, and then someone decides to pull the trigger and poof! All of our production and backup data are encrypted.

■ Weather in general has me always freaked out! Water and data centers don't mix well.

While data center-destroying clowns may not be so likely, some of these fears are definitely legitimate. Another fear many systems administrators have is staying relevant today and into the future, especially considering the continual and rapid rate of change we see in the data center (think hyperconvergence, the cloud and hybrid IT, microservices, containers, DevOps, serverless architecture, etc.). So, in closing, I thought I'd provide some advice I think may help:

Develop an application-centric mindset

What matters to the business most is that applications are working well all the time, because every business, and every component of every business, is now dependent on applications. The modern systems administrator needs to think about application uptime and performance first and foremost — end user experience metrics are now part of the CIO's SLA.

Use monitoring with discipline to be the "silent hero"

Given the importance of application uptime and performance, systems and application monitoring needs to become second nature. Systems administrators must implement and manage comprehensive monitoring solutions in order to optimize application performance, realign resources, identify early warning signs of problems and take proactive action. By finding and solving a problem before any end users even know there is a problem, the systems administrator becomes the "silent hero."

Embrace the role of strategic adviser rather than simply remaining a problem fixer

Thanks to the consumerization of technology, the control of many technology decisions has shifted from systems administrator to the end user. This means systems administrators should look to provide insight and advice to all parts of the business to help end users and department leaders make intelligent choices, rather than just responding to tickets.

Learn how to make the right technology decisions for the business

There is a myriad new technologies available to IT: from those mentioned above to IoT to big data. Systems administrators must be smart about choosing the technologies that can truly add value to the business and be able to integrate them when they reach the right level of maturity.

Always keep security top of mind

Whatever a systems administrator does, security needs to be a top priority. The sophistication of attacks is increasing and evolving just as quickly as organizations can prepare for them, sometimes faster. Exacerbating the issue is how much sensitive information companies are storing in today's era of Big Data. And the weakest link remain the end users. Today's systems administrators must continually take steps to ensure the security of their organizations' digital infrastructure.

Kong Yang is a Head Geek at SolarWinds.

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

The Latest

Keys to Building a Partner Ecosystem That Scales

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

How AI Agents Are Reshaping DataOps for the Always-On Enterprise

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Nine in Ten Enterprises Plan Cloud Data Repatriation amid Rising Cloud Costs and Data Sovereignty Mandates

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Why ITOps Need Right-Sized AI, Not Bigger Models

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

The End of Reactive DevOps: AI-Driven Observability for Zero-Defect Digital Systems

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

5 Takeaways from the Observability Forecast for Media and Entertainment

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Why Moving Off the Cloud Is the Easy Part and What Comes Next Is Where Things Get Hard

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 24: Network Observability Tool Sprawl

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

Capacity Isn't a Guess: Observability-Driven Sizing for On-Prem Databases

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

The Data Center: IT's Halloween Fear Factory

Kong Yang
Learn more about SolarWinds

I was working in the data center, late one night
When my eyes beheld an eerie sight
For my infrastructure began to screech
And suddenly there was a breach …
 
Hey, it's Halloween, how could I not take advantage of the opportunity for a little IT-style "Monster Mash?"

The spookiest day of the year is here, and Halloween is actually a good reminder that trouble in the data center is always lurking just beneath the application surface, ready to wreak havoc at any moment.

So, in the spirit of Halloween, SolarWinds recently asked our THWACK community of IT professionals their deepest, darkest IT fears. While some are definitely good for a chuckle, and you'll probably just nod your head in agreement at others, the responses simply allude to the fact that in IT, if things can go wrong, they usually will, and how important it is to be prepared to address the many challenges that exist.

Here are a handful of the responses we got:

■ Stupidity. Yes, my number one fear is stupidity. Not mine, mind you, but others'. For example, I recently walked into a client's site and found a ton of power strips laying on the floor behind their telecom racks. It would have been so easy for someone to have simply tripped over one, unplugging it in the process. Doing so would have caused an outage to an entire manufacturing plant.

■ My greatest IT fear (and fear is general) is clowns on backhoes digging all around our facility looking for that undocumented fiber or twisted pair. (Shudder.)

■ My greatest fear is upper management not understanding the importance of redundancy. Our ERP system is at headquarters and all plants communicate with it almost nonstop for labels and shipping information to get product out. Having headquarters' WAN connection die and then needing to wait for hardware to arrive to replace it would bring business to a halt.

■ My leading fear is our monitoring software either taking an unscheduled dirt nap for some reason or otherwise becoming unavailable. Flying blind in this day and age is a scary proposition. It would indeed be a dark day.

■ Human error can be the worst nightmare of all. I've seen overly enthusiastic electricians and phone technicians cut lines they weren't supposed to.

■ Aside from my technological nightmares, my biggest fear is a server fan eating my beard. There are some devices out there (NexSAN SATABeast, anyone?) that have massive fans, and I've come close to being eaten alive a few times. Aside from the immediate pain, the call to support to get a replacement fan would be quite awkward...

■ My biggest fear? That a "new" and as of yet undetected vulnerability is wreaking havoc in my environment, letting bad guys take whatever data they want even as I write this … and that it then ends up on every news channel with our company logo big and bold.

■ Natural disasters are especially frightening to me as an IT professional, whether it be hurricanes, tornadoes or particularly earthquakes. I'm both curious (and not interested) in finding out the technological ramifications an earthquake would have in our data center and the subsequent ripple (no pun intended … OK, pun intended) effect throughout the organization. Not just server racks, but the smaller stuff, too, like all the creative ways an earthquake would kill spinning hard drives. (Though, if racks are just falling over, hard drives would probably be the least of our worries.)

■ I'm deathly afraid that there's ransomware living on some of our critical production and backup data without us knowing it, and then someone decides to pull the trigger and poof! All of our production and backup data are encrypted.

■ Weather in general has me always freaked out! Water and data centers don't mix well.

While data center-destroying clowns may not be so likely, some of these fears are definitely legitimate. Another fear many systems administrators have is staying relevant today and into the future, especially considering the continual and rapid rate of change we see in the data center (think hyperconvergence, the cloud and hybrid IT, microservices, containers, DevOps, serverless architecture, etc.). So, in closing, I thought I'd provide some advice I think may help:

Develop an application-centric mindset

What matters to the business most is that applications are working well all the time, because every business, and every component of every business, is now dependent on applications. The modern systems administrator needs to think about application uptime and performance first and foremost — end user experience metrics are now part of the CIO's SLA.

Use monitoring with discipline to be the "silent hero"

Given the importance of application uptime and performance, systems and application monitoring needs to become second nature. Systems administrators must implement and manage comprehensive monitoring solutions in order to optimize application performance, realign resources, identify early warning signs of problems and take proactive action. By finding and solving a problem before any end users even know there is a problem, the systems administrator becomes the "silent hero."

Embrace the role of strategic adviser rather than simply remaining a problem fixer

Thanks to the consumerization of technology, the control of many technology decisions has shifted from systems administrator to the end user. This means systems administrators should look to provide insight and advice to all parts of the business to help end users and department leaders make intelligent choices, rather than just responding to tickets.

Learn how to make the right technology decisions for the business

There is a myriad new technologies available to IT: from those mentioned above to IoT to big data. Systems administrators must be smart about choosing the technologies that can truly add value to the business and be able to integrate them when they reach the right level of maturity.

Always keep security top of mind

Whatever a systems administrator does, security needs to be a top priority. The sophistication of attacks is increasing and evolving just as quickly as organizations can prepare for them, sometimes faster. Exacerbating the issue is how much sensitive information companies are storing in today's era of Big Data. And the weakest link remain the end users. Today's systems administrators must continually take steps to ensure the security of their organizations' digital infrastructure.

Kong Yang is a Head Geek at SolarWinds.

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

The Latest

Keys to Building a Partner Ecosystem That Scales

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

How AI Agents Are Reshaping DataOps for the Always-On Enterprise

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Nine in Ten Enterprises Plan Cloud Data Repatriation amid Rising Cloud Costs and Data Sovereignty Mandates

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Why ITOps Need Right-Sized AI, Not Bigger Models

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

The End of Reactive DevOps: AI-Driven Observability for Zero-Defect Digital Systems

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

5 Takeaways from the Observability Forecast for Media and Entertainment

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Why Moving Off the Cloud Is the Easy Part and What Comes Next Is Where Things Get Hard

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 24: Network Observability Tool Sprawl

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

Capacity Isn't a Guess: Observability-Driven Sizing for On-Prem Databases

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...