Blog Entry

(View Disclaimer)

I'm officially caught up in the Olympic fever.

Much to the chagrin of my family I've been spending several hours each night catching up on the status of the Canadian athletes in obscure sports such as luge, and freestyle skiing. This is all despite the fact that I have no idea how these sports are judged or who any of these athletes are.

That's the great thing about the Olympics for me. Every four years I give myself a crash course in some brand new sports that I never pay much attention to. The sad thing is once the Olympic flame is out, I stop following them, until the next Olympics comes up.

This habit of ignoring things until a critical event comes up, is also a bad habit I see in the customer datacenters I visit (I bet you didn't see that coming!). The reality is that in the datacenter, administrators and managers have so many jobs in the air at any given time, that it's immensely difficult to stay on top of what's happening within each component of their infrastructure at any given time.

That's where products such as those offered by Novell, come in to play. Products such as PlateSpin Recon allow you to proactively report on and forecast out different behaviors in datacenter infrastructure. PlateSpin Orchestrate takes that one step further and allows you to add as much or as little automation as you need to the intelligence provided by Recon as well.

Complete the stack with PlateSpin MIgrate and PlateSpin Forge allowing you to seamlessly migrate and protect your server workloads.

At the end of the day, adding management solutions from a vendor like Novell allows you to stay on top of everything that's happening in your datacenter each and every day. Without having to wait for an Olympic sized flame to be lit.

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.