Best of the Data Center Blogs: The Human Factor

Here’s a roundup of some interesting items we came across this week in our reading of data center industry blogs. The strong theme this week was staffing:

Servers are cheap, talent is expensive - At CloudPundit, Gartner's Lydia Leong looks at the cloud as a force that can free in-house staff top innovate: "Just because you can do it yourself doesn’t mean that you should. Even if your engineers think they’re just as smart as Amazon’s engineers (which they might well be), and are chomping at the bit to prove it. If you can outsource a capability that doesn’t generate competitive advantage for you, then you can free your best people to work on the things that do generate competitive advantage."

Four Simple Keys to Operational Excellence - Mark Thiele at SwitchScribe is also writing about the human factor: "It’s oddly ironic that the easiest and most cost effective things we can do to provide better availability of systems are generally the things we ignore or get lazy about. That’s right, the best return on investment of any high availability strategy is the investment made in the human portion of the equation."

Data Center Selection - Picking The Team - Industry veteran Dan Golding has launched the DataCenter Insight blog, and begins with an item on team building for new facilities: "One observation I've made is that most buyers are not getting what they really want because they don't have the right folks doing the buying. ... The ideal datacenter selection team is an interdisciplinary group with each member having a unique talent - think of the A-Team, but with blinking servers rather than exploding vans."