Web Operations

Operations

In the inherently always-on web operations environments of today, there is little time for planned outages, maintenance, and other common operations that affect site availability and revenue generation. Essentially, no time is a good time to be down or to have your workload affected, ever. Tasks such as regular backups, disk failures, replication, and software and firmware upgrades must not disrupt your workload, and you must take these factors into account when designing your storage infrastructure.

There are a few best practices I'd like to point out that are essential for big storage shops to operate with much less pain. These same things can help smaller shops as well. Here are a handful of the things I make sure to always do at the companies I work for. They are common sense, but I'm listing them here because I think they are very helpful.

Make sure to lock down and document your escalation paths and points of contact into your storage suppliers so that you know who to contact and how to contact them in emergency situations. This means making sure you have a list of phone numbers and email addresses for everyone on your account. This includes your account manager, your systems engineer, and your primary support contact. Do the same thing in reverse—include the escalation path, phone numbers, and email addresses for the members of the storage team, the storage manager, and the manager of the storage manager so that the supplier can easily contact your company if it ...