New Year’s resolutions for IT administrators

[StorageExperts]

IT administrators are resolving to lose the weight of legacy hardware, exercise new data storage technologies, practice better backup habits, and improve their hybrid cloud capabilities in 2022. What's on your New Year's resolutions list?

New Year’s is the traditional time to make resolutions to continue best practices, change bad behaviors, accomplish new goals and objectives, and otherwise plan to improve our lives.

We expect this is no different for the IT professionals who architect, deploy and manage the infrastructure that stores the important corporate data, runs the business applications, and networks it all together.

Along with typical New Year’s resolutions around weight loss, exercise, and eating better, we expect to see IT admins around the globe resolving to lose the weight of legacy hardware, exercise new data storage technologies, practice better backup habits, and improve their hybrid cloud capabilities in 2022. 

Here are some top New Year’s resolutions for IT admins for 2022.

1. Lose weight

Survey the existing set of servers, isolate and consolidate any server with older hardware as it’s a waste of your valuable and limited DataCenter space. i.e. a 2012 era dual socket Quad Core machine can easily be replaced with a dual socket 26 core machine offering a consolidation of 6-to-1 in terms of physical machines to manage as well as equally drastic reductions in power, cooling, and support. Processor example: Compare a 2012 Intel Xeon x5620 (Quad Core, 80 Watts) to a modern 2020 Intel Xeon 6230R (26 cores, 150 Watts)

Additionally you should visit the Microsoft Server Catalog to determine what level of support older servers have for a more modern operating system (found here), and if your server is supported on a newer OS, the HPE Support Site (found here) to download the appropriate drivers. This is not a foregone conclusion however as as a newer version of the OS may require support for new CPU features such as SLAT or UEFI Boot which prevent these older systems from successfully upgrading to a modern OS

2. Eliminate clutter

This consolidation effort should incorporate a transition from physical to virtual servers, which you can do using free Microsoft tools; specifically the SysInternals tool called Disk2VHD (found here), and the entire process can be automated using PowerShell. The elimination of these machines can reduce support ticket count, cable management, network drops, UPS load, and management endpoints; all without compromising performance.

Common practice is to order slightly too large to account for growth; however with reduced IT budgets and the increase in flexibility capabilities of virtual machines this practice can be greatly limited as adding more CPU/Memory/Networking/Storage to Virtual machines can be done in seconds and in most cases live and can be facilitated by adding additional nodes to a Hyper-V cluster, and rebalancing the load across the newly added assets.

3. Exercise more

With a new collection of virtual machines to manage instead of physical machines, which can be hosted on Primera or Alletra storage if you prefer a SAN based approach which allows you to use Windows Standard Server licensing terms; or hosted on a Software Defined Storage solution such as AzureStack HCI however which incorporates a pay-as-you-go scheme but will require the Windows DataCenter Licensing terms. Either way, now that your machines are virtual they can be relocated across the cluster on a whim. This allows these hosted Virtual Machines to survive physical hardware faults, patch/security updates without a hiccup to your services. This change allows you change your mind-set; to treat you Physical Servers as Workhorses, which have the duty to participate in a cluster and host Guest VMs, and lets you treat your services as the all-important customer. Your customers (services hosted on VMs) get to float above the hardware freeing you to remove and insert new up-to-date hardware as you see fit without a service impact.   

4. Adopt better habits

Now that you have both consolidated and hardened your equipment from isolated faults and are running your service more reliably, it’s time to adopt a backup strategy that takes advantages of both the virtual nature of your servers, as well as the hardware offload and snapshot protection afforded by the intelligent storage. You now have a number of backup options previously unavailable to you.

The classic method of backup was to either use locally install backup agents on the server to allow for a backup that includes the boot drive, or to use array-based off-loaded backup like array snapshots to protect specific data drives that are either Fibre Channel or iSCSI attached.

While these options are still available, you now have a new layer that you can back up from, which is to back up the VM which can still be offloaded using Array based Snapshot Technolgy, and directed by HPE StoreOnce/VEEAM, Zerto, or a number of other backup packages, Hyper-V replica, or ASR (Azure Site Recovery).

5. Eliminate destructive habits

This physical-to-virtual conversion also lets you update the underlying processors and accompanying hardware offloads on these servers, which in turn allows you to update these virtual machines to modern supported operating systems. In this case, Windows Server 2019 or Windows Server 2022 which ensures that you will be protected from the looming and increasing cyber threats. Older OS’s are an invitation to being hacked, and eliminating these older systems is paramount to a safe infrastructure.

As an example, any OS older than Windows Server 2008 means that you have SMB v1.0 in your environment, which encrypts passwords using well broken MD5, while Windows Server 2008 and 2008R2 introduced SMB 2.0 and 2.1, signing wasn’t enforced until Windows Server 2012 using SMB3. Without SMB signing, a bad actor in the network can use a man-in-the-middle attack and drop the protocol down to a lower version where the password can be harvested. In modern OS such as Windows Server 2016 and newer, both Signing are enforced automatically, and SMB 1.0 connections are forbidden by default. Each newer version of the OS includes updates to SMB that both increase performance as well as security.

Many examples exist where the modern OS is far harder to compromise than an outdated OS; in fact the common attack vector is to target the oldest OS first, and use that to escalate privileges. 

6. Focus on the important things in life

You need a work life balance; when isolated hardware fails, you shouldn’t be called at 3AM to fix it, and the system should automatically recover or continue operations and let you repair items as a normal day-to-day business operation instead of a fire-drill emergency. Add to this the ability to script common activities and operations; and you will find your coming year calmer and finally obtain that elusive Zen state when you know your little piece of this universe is in order.

So along with more pushups and less red meat, add these resolutions to your plans for 2022 for a happier, healthier IT life.

Please add your top resolutions to the list in the comments section below. And for more ideas on improving your data storage visit us at www.hpe.com/Storage/Microsoft and get daily suggestions on Twitter at #HPEMSData.

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Meet HPE Storage Expert Chris Lionetti

Chris is a veteran of the storage industry who has been building complex systems and SANs for over 25 years. He has long been actively involved with the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA), and is currently the board vice chair. He is also a reference architect on the HPE Storage team. Chris participates in many technical working groups, and holds 9 patents on topics related to data centers, networking, and storage.  Follow Chris on Twitter.

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