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Shark Tank: How we won the cold war
44 comments- IT TOPICS:Management, Personal Technology, Servers & Data Center
This financial services company's offices are beautiful, well appointed and overlooking the water. And the data center is state of the art, says a consultant pilot fish on the scene.
"However, due to the ritzy neighborhood, space was at a premium," fish says. "When management decided to expand the data center to accommodate new business, they converted a set of executive offices right next to the old data center to a new data center.
"The executives were mostly redistributed through the office, except for the highest levels who got spiffy new offices in a suite across the hall."
The expanded data center rapidly fills with equipment. And in short order, that equipment begins to fail. The problem: overheating.
But why? Building maintenance checks out the air conditioning units, and they're OK. It takes some outside consultants to discover that the air conditioning for the new data center is still part of the system for the regular offices, controlled from two regular office thermostats -- one in the data center, the other in the regular office.
"This was contrary to IT's recommendations, but management needed to cut corners somewhere to lower the expense of construction, and that one they figured they could get away with," fish says.
"Unfortunately, a war had developed between IT and the rest of the office. The executives were raising the temperature, the IT guys were lowering it and the office workers were raising it up again. And there was no money left over in the budget to fix the problem."
Finally, one weekend the IT manager calls in the consultants to do some "critical maintenance" -- which consists of disconnecting the leads from the office thermostat, so only the one in IT can change the temperature.
The following week, fish watches as the office manager fiddles with the thermostat. It's not long before he sees the office manager and the building maintenance guys clustered around the thermostat, having an animated conversation.
And soon after that, fish hears some of the office workers talking about a faulty air conditioner on the roof.
"Turns out the IT manager took the building maintenance guys out for dinner at the same time we did our 'critical maintenance' and made some sort of deal," says fish. "They continued to make excuses to the office guys for some months until the weather changed and everyone forgot all about it.
"The following year, 'data center environmental systems' made their way into the new IT budget."
Budget some time to send your true tale of IT life to me at sharky@computerworld.com. You'll get a snazzy Shark shirt if I use it. You can also add comments by using the form at the bottom of this page.
See more Shark Tank stories at the Sharkives.
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