Popular Support Providers Chris and Greg Tinker's Take on the Future of Integrated IT Support

Popular Support Providers Chris and Greg Tinker's Take on
the Future of Integrated IT Support
Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on rapid-response IT support on mission critical
applications and systems.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hi. This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're
listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on why IT customer
support is so important and why industry changes are forcing an integration
and empowerment effect for how helpdesks respond and perform.

We're here with two lauded IT Master Technologists from HP to learn more
about what makes good customer support tick. Part of the solution comes
from providing a more centralized, efficient, and powerful means of getting all the systems
involved working, and all the knowledge necessary to come together to quickly get people back
in action and keep them there. But, it also involves getting disparate parties and vendors across
an IT ecosystem to work together in new ways. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect
podcasts.]

These two technologists, who happen to be identical twins, were chosen via a sweepstakes
hosted by HP to identify favorite customer support personnel. We will learn why they gained
such recognition and uncover their recommendations for how IT support should be done better
now and later in a rapidly changing future of increasingly hybrid and cloud modeled computing.

Please join me now in welcoming our guests. We're here with Chris Tinker and Greg Tinker, both
HP Master Technologists. Welcome to you, Chris.

Chris Tinker: Hi, Dana.

Gardner: And also to you, Greg.

Greg Tinker: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: Let me congratulate you on this award. This was I think a worldwide pool or at least a
very large group of people that you were chosen from. So, congratulations on that.

Greg Tinker: Yes, Dana, thank you very much.

Gardner: Did this come as a surprise? How did you feel when you learned about it?

Greg Tinker: It was an honor, I can say that, and we are very grateful for that. Our customer
installed base, as well as our peers and the management team, put
our names into this situation. It was a great honor.

Gardner: Yes.

Chris Tinker: And it was a surprise.

Gardner: Just so we could fill this out a bit, in addition to the quiz
and sweepstakes, there was a philanthropic element as well. Every
time folks voted, a $10 donation was made to CARE, a leading
humanitarian organization that fights global poverty. Is that right?

Greg Tinker: That's correct. For each vote that was cast, HP
donated $10 to the humanitarian organization Care, to max out at a
$100,000. They met that goal in just a few days. It was quite
astonishing.

Gardner: Great. Now, it's kind of ironic from my perspective, because I'm thinking that some of
the most unpopular people can sometimes be the IT support, because people are in a really
difficult situation when they encounter them, but you guys won the popularity contest for an
unpopular task. How does that feel?

Greg Tinker: It's definitely an honor. It's our livelihood, but it’s definitely rewarding.

Chris Tinker: Very rewarding.

Their darkest hour

Gardner: You deal with people when they are, in some cases, their darkest hour. They're under
pressure. There's something that's gone wrong. They're calling you. So, you're not just there in a
technical sense, which of course is important, but there must be a human dynamic to this as well.
How does that work?

Chris Tinker: We become their confidant. We foster a relationship there between the two
parties. For us, it's very exhilarating. It's the ultimate test. You want to build both the technical
and business, but also the interpersonal relationship, because you have to weigh in on so many
levels, not just technical. That’s a critical component, but not the only component.

Gardner: Anything to add to that, Greg?

Greg Tinker: No, Chris actually summed it up quite nicely. He and I both have a passion for
what we do and we really thrive in the heat of the moment.

Gardner: All right. So what does it take to be a good IT support person nowadays? Let me start
with you Chris?

Chris Tinker: It’s simply not enough to be a technical guru -- not in today's industry. You have
to have a good understanding of technology, yes, but you also have to understand the tools and
realize that technology is simply a tool for business outcomes. If you're listening to the business,
understanding what their concerns and their challenges are, then you can apply that
understanding to their technical situation to essentially work for a solution.

Gardner: Greg, how about for you? What do you think makes a good IT support person?

Greg Tinker: I second Chris's sentiment on that, and I'll add this. Chris and I study, almost on a
daily basis, to stay ahead of the technology curve. Chris and I both do a lot
in SCSI I/O control logic, with respect to the kernel structure of HP-UX as
well as Linux, which is our playground, if you will.

And, it takes what I would call firm foundation to be able to provide that
strong wealth of knowledge to be the customer's confidant. You can't be an
expert at one point anymore. You can't be a network expert only. You have
to understand the entire gamut of the business, so that you can understand
the customer's technical problem.

Gardner: It's not enough to go to them and say, "Well, that's really not
part of our technical expertise. You'll have to go somewhere else." People
don't want to hear that. They want that one hand to shake, right?

Greg Tinker: That's correct, and today the customer expects the technical master technologist,
like my brother and I, not just to know the one thing they're asking about, because that question
is going to quickly turn. For example, I am having an Oracle performance issue, the customer
thinks it may be disk related, but when you dig into it, you find out that it's actually an ODBC
call, a networking issue. So, you have to be quite proficient at a multitude of technologies and
have a lot of depth and breadth.

Gardner: How did you both get involved with this? Did one get into it first and the other
follow? What's the story behind how you ended up here?

Lengthy road

Greg Tinker: It was quite a lengthy road. Chris and I actually started off going in one direction,
and we agreed many years ago in school that one of us would go one direction and the other in
another, and see who was enjoying the industry better. Chris joined HP and fell in love with it.
He and I have a very strong Linux background. Then, I jumped ship and went with my brother
Chris, and we have been with HP ever since, and have loved it dearly.

Chris Tinker: That's a great point. We look at IT support as a ladder and we just climbed that
ladder. We started in mission-critical support and found it to be
exhilarating. With mission-critical support you're talking about enterprise-
class corporations. We're not talking about consumer products. We're
talking about an entire corporation's business running on an IT solution
and how we're engaged in that process.

Unfortunately, in our line of work, we do see customers, where the
technology did not go as planned, predicted, or expected and it's up to us
to essentially figure out what the expectations are with technology and
ascertain whether or not the technology can deliver that. That's how we
moved through support.

We started off as mission-critical support specialists. We became architects, designing solutions
for corporations and found out that we were very good at escalations and that's where we are
today.

Gardner: You've mentioned exhilarating a couple of times. Maybe you could provide us a
memorable example of why that's the case. Is there some event that you were involved with in
this capacity that comes to mind that illustrates that sense of exhilaration? Let me start with you,
Greg.

Greg Tinker: Well, I can't give customer names out, but I will stick to one particular incident. It
was a dire-strait moment, where a customer deployed a particular non-intrusive patch. They
didn't think anything of it, and it actually caused a catastrophic kernel panic inside their
infrastructure and shut down their entire enterprise. Once that condition was met, they couldn't
boot the enterprise back up, and then it became a pointing game as to what was the fault, was it
x, y, or z?

That's when my brother and I got engaged in this to find that one smoking gun that was causing
the environment to panic. And, all eyes were on us. When I talk about exhilarating, we're talking
about C-level execs and everybody else staring at you with hands on the keyboard to figure out
what's causing this panic situation.

That’s where Chris and I really thrive. We were able to isolate the condition in probably about an
hour-and-a-half and pull out that component, the offender, and get the enterprise back rolling
again.

Chris Tinker: Not to speak light of the customer situation, but it was a fun moment -- and I say
fun in air quotes -- because you have the C-level execs standing over your shoulder, literally
watching what you are doing. They're sweating because they've been down for so much time. I
should state here that it wasn't the HP technology or HP solution that was at fault. It was a third-
party interoperability issue that had gone down and caused that interruption.

But, we did isolate it and we did figure out what it was. We talked to that vendor, partnered with
them, and got the solution in place in very short order.

Gardner: I imagine that, even though typically these vendors don't always have all of their
ducks aligned, when it comes to this sort of a mission-critical situation, they're probably thankful
that there's someone there trying to corral this. So, I imagine the cooperation is pretty high in
these circumstances.

Stakes are high

Chris Tinker: Yeah, the stakes are high at this level. You are talking about, not only the
corporation, the customer, but you are also talking about the vendors, whether it be
HP or third party, and we are partnering with all these vendors. Everybody has
got a stake in the game. Essentially, their reputation is on the line.

So we partner, regardless. As we don’t want to be thrown under the bus, we
don’t throw anybody else under the bus. We partner. We come together as
one throat to choke or one hand to shake, however you want to look at it.
But, essentially, we all have the same thing in common, the customer’s
wellbeing.

Greg Tinker: I'll second Chris’ sentiment on that, in the sense that when we're engaged at our
level, it's no longer a ﬁnger-pointing game. It's a partnership, regardless of who the customer is.
If it's HP gear, so be it. If it's somebody else’s gear, and we see where the problem is at, we don't
point the ﬁnger. We ask the customer to get their vendor on the bridge with us and we work as a
team to get the business restored, because that’s priority one.

Chris Tinker: That’s HP technical support. That’s what we thrive at. That’s one of our charters.
Our management has dictated that they want team effort, global effort.

Gardner: I suppose you can always deconstruct fault afterward, and the point is to get people up
and running ASAP.

Greg Tinker: That’s right.

Chris Tinker: That’s exactly right. Root cause is a nice to have, business online is better.

Gardner: Right. How long have you guys been doing this? How long has this been your
profession and your passion?

Chris Tinker: Thirteen years now.

Greg Tinker: Twelve for me.

Gardner: Okay, 12 and 13 years. What's changed over that period of time? It seems as if
complexity just keeps rolling higher and higher, with more unintended consequences as a result

of that. What would you characterize, Chris, as what's evolved or changed most in the past dozen
years or so?

Chris Tinker: Catchphrases change. Today it's cloud computing, but cloud computing has been
around for a long time. We just didn’t refer to it as cloud computing. Shared infrastructure of
course is what we called it.

Virtualization today is becoming a big ticket item, where in years past, big iron was the thing that
was a catchphrase. Big iron was very large computers. We still have big iron in storage, that’s
true. We still have that big footprint, big powerhouse, that consumes a lot of power, but that’s a
necessity of the storage platform.

The big thing for today is converged infrastructure. These are terms you wouldn’t have heard
years ago, where we are trying to converge multiple type of protocols, physical media under one
medium, networking, Fibre Channel, which of course is your storage network, TCP/IP network,
going across the same physical piece of media. These are things that are changing, and of course
with that comes extreme amount of complexity, especially when it comes into the actual engine
that drives this.

Gardner: Additional thoughts, Greg? What's changed in your perception?

Big iron

Greg Tinker: As Chris stated, the key phrase of yesteryear was big iron. I want a big behemoth
machine that can outdo mainframe. If you look back to 1999 and 2000, what you were looking
for in the open system world was something to compete with Big Blue.

Today it's virtualization and blades. Everybody used to say -- probably about mid-2005 -- "I want
a pizza box. I want a new blade." We no longer call those blades. Those are called pizza boxes
now. Today, the concept is all about blades. If you can't make the thing 3 inches tall and 1 inch
wide, there is something wrong.

Gardner: You've been describing how things have changed technically. How have things
changed in terms of the customer requirements and/or the customer culture? That is to say, what
are their expectations or perceptions? Let's start with you Chris.

Chris Tinker: Expectation is more for less. They want more computing power. They want more
IT for less cost, which I think that’s been true since day one, but today, of course, that "more for
less" just means more computing power. The footprint of the servers has changed.

And two, the support model has changed. Keep in mind, we're in support, and we're seeing a
trend with these concepts where customers are having all these physical servers and the support
contracts on all these servers are being consolidated down to one physical server with virtual
instances.

The support model of yesteryear doesn’t always fit the support model that they should have
today.

Greg Tinker: What Chris is talking about there is consolidation efforts. Customers used to have
500 servers. Today, -- I want to exaggerate my point here -- we have it on a virtualization of one
or two physical machines that are behemoth and it's virtualized 500 guests.

Though that model works right for consolidating the cost effort of the infrastructure, so your
capital cost is less, the problem now becomes the support model. Customers tend to reduce the
support as well, because it's less infrastructure. But, keep in mind, most customers kind of forget
a lot of times that they've put all their eggs into the basket and that basket needs a lot of
protection.

So now you have your entire enterprise running on one or two pieces of physical hardware that is
a grossly complex with not only the virtual servers, but the virtual Ethernet modules, the Fibre
Channel model concepts are all now basically one concept to run every protocol type, whether
you are running infiniband, Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, etc., the complexity requires a great
deal of support.

When a customer calls up and says, "We've made a change in our environment and my server has
crashed, the physical server went down, or has lost access to its storage or network," you're not
just affecting that one physical server, but you're affecting hundreds. So, the support model today
is quick.

Chris Tinker: To add to Greg’s point, a compartmentalization of yesteryear was, "I have
physical servers in racks and I will go to another row with a different rack. It has more servers
there." So, your compartmentalization, your isolated zones, were in the physical data center,
where today your isolated compartmentalized zones are within the same chassis.

Gardner: It sounds to me that there is a higher risk profile. Is that a fair characterization?

Hardware redundancy

Greg Tinker: That would be a fair characterization. There is a higher risk on the hardware end
in the sense that you still have hardware redundancy, of course, but you're fully dependent upon
cluster technology and complexity.

Let's talk about the chassis. The chassis concept of our blade infrastructure, and this is true for
most vendors, is that you are redundant there. But, if you want to be redundant at the hardware
layer, you've got to have yet another chassis. In order to get that redundancy across the chassis
components, you have to have a virtualization software on top of it, adding more complexity,
which becomes a real need for a powerful support base.

Chris Tinker: A good solution design for business risk assessments are still a critical component
to your solution design.

Gardner: I'm going to guess that over the past several years in the tradeoff for cost and risk,
people probably favor the cost side a bit. So, that means the people in your position are the
backstop. "I'll assume more risk and I'll have some cost benefits, but in order for me to survive,
I'm going to need a more capable IT support function." Is that a fair assessment?

Greg Tinker: That’s what the trend is becoming. The trend is, "We're going to reduce our cost in
the CAPEX and reduce our cost in the infrastructure. We're going to consolidate and virtualize
that concept, and we are going to look at our support strategy in a different light." That’s what
most customers think.

Gardner: What is that new light?

Greg Tinker: The new light today is that customers are focused more on the higher end support
models, meaning four-hour call to repair, where it used to be 24-hour or 48-hour support models,
where we were not in a huge rush. If we had a disk drive failure, we had plenty of time, because
we had full redundancy, whatever. So we had plenty of time to fix those components.

Today, with all this consolidation effort, it becomes a real critical need when you have a failing
component, whether it be hardware or software, to get that component addressed urgently. You
don’t really have the time.

Chris Tinker: That’s a great point. Looking at that standard support model, you had so many
physical servers and your business was essentially interlaced with these systems. You could
handle an outage, whether software or hardware condition. It wasn't as strategic or as strong as
today’s virtualized environments, where you would have much heavier business impact.

To Greg’s point, this inter-support model used to work with some of these virtualized
environments. I am not saying all virtualized environments, but some of these virtualized
environments. With four-hour call-to-repair, you can imagine in four hours what’s required. The
technologists who answer the phone first have to address the business concerns to figure out what
the business impact is and understand what the problem is.

Once we ascertain what’s causing that problem and the problem has been defined, we have to
figure out what’s going wrong with the technology in order to bring it back online.

Business assessment

All that has to be done within four hours on some of our most critical contracts. Of course,
that’s the most advanced contract. There are many stages between that one and all the way down
to standard support. There are all levels in between, and that customized support model has to be
a business assessment.

Gardner: So, we have these trends around increased complexity, reduced time to repair or
meantime to emulate your issues. We also have a higher level of concentration of risk and an
impetus to cut cost, and you guys are dropped in the middle of that.

What does this mean for your role? It sounds like you need to be good technically. You need to
be almost Professional Services as well as helpdesk and support. You need to have those good
interpersonal skills, a background in architecture, a background in a variety of different
technologies. Help me understand what it is that you think comes together that allow somebody
to do what you do?

Greg Tinker: I think the biggest thing I would say is having strong technical background.
Having in-depth knowledge of C is a good idea, knowing the kernel structure. That way when
you have a failure in a component, software or hardware, you have a clear understanding in the
stack as to where the problem most likely resides. You need to have a good idea of where to
focus.

"I'm having a set-sock-opt error in the TCP protocol stack." You know you don’t have to look at
the Fibre Channel stack. Granted, I'm making that way too simple on purpose. My point is that
you have to have a very clear understanding of where the stuff resides.

Chris Tinker: It's having an understanding of the actual layers, and in computer technology it's
understanding all about the layers of the technology, whether it be the hardware layer or the
upper layer stack. If they describe a problem to you as X, it's being able to understand where
would that fall, what layer would that fall in. And, that’s going to expedite your ability to
troubleshoot that problem.

But, to Greg’s point, that goes back to listening -- listening to the problem, listening to the
customer's situation. The very ﬁrst thing you do is not start looking at logs. You start listening to
the customer’s problem and having that relationship. One of the key components here is
ownership, letting the customer know that I am engaged now, I own this, I'll work with you, and
we will get this solved. That gives them the conﬁdence and the reassurance that there is
somebody that’s going to work with them. That’s what HP Technical Support is all about --
having that ownership.

Gardner: There have also been some shifts over the past dozen years or so in the degree to
which remote support is possible and your ability to get inside and get that information. Maybe
we could take a moment to learn more about what tools have been brought to bear to help you
with this, when you get that phone call. When you're dealing with that customer in their moment
of need, their darkest hour, you also have a bit more of an arsenal. You have some arrows in your
quiver. Maybe you could explain what you think are the most powerful ones and why they work
well.

HP virtual room

Chris Tinker: The HP Virtual Room (HPVR). If you go to rooms.hp.com, it’s a good example.
As you just mentioned, yesteryear it was, "Hey, send me the logs. Send me the examples. Send
me some data, and I'll parse through it and figure it out." You had to wait for data to come in and
then start parsing those logs, parsing that data, and building your hypothesis of what might be the
problem.

Now, imagine if I were able to take that in real time. So, Greg, talk about real time.

Greg Tinker: Real time is key in today’s technology world. Nobody wants to wait. Take your
phone for example. Can you stand it when you have pressed the email button and your phone
takes more than three seconds to load it up? Everybody gets annoyed when it's slow. Well, the
same is true in technology services support.

When customers call in, they expect immediate response. By the time it gets to our level, where
Chris and I sit and our team resides inside the support model, the customer is in dire straits. We
use the Virtual Room technology. It's similar to WebEx.

There are a lot of similarities out there. Different vendors have different tools. We use the HP
Virtual Room toolset and we can jump onto any machine in the world, anywhere in the world, at
a moment’s notice. We can do crash analysis on a Linux kernel crash in real time on a customer’s
machine. The same with HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, name your favorite.

We can look at these stack traces and actually find the most likely component that compromises
the infrastructure. We can find it, isolate it, and remedy it.

Chris Tinker: Not only is it just us troubleshooting, but it's bringing to bear our peers. It's team
work, a two-heads-are-better-than-one mentality. Greg even lived that first. At the end of the day,
you've got 2, 4, or 20 people on the phone. You can imagine all of those people sharing the same
desktop at the same time to try to look at a problem. You get all these different levels of
expertise.

You're able to take all these talents and focus them on one scenario. So, now with four-hour call
to repair, how is that even possible? It's possible when we have to bring these people and partner
with these people. They could be not only HP employees and HP technical support. That goes
back to vendors and those relationships. We bring those vendors into the same Virtual Room,
showing them where we're seeing the problem and asking what we need to do to solve this.

Gardner: That puts you in the role of being the conductor in an orchestra in a sense. That’s
another skill set as well, getting that leadership and the ability to get people to line up and focus
on a common problem. Does that come up more nowadays?

Chris Tinker: We have many hats to wear. It goes back to our prior point that being a technical
guru is not the only critical component to being able to execute at this level.

Greg Tinker: It's knowing one’s limitations. As powerful as Chris and I are in the technology
world, we have limitations like anyone would. That’s why it's a team effort. Using tools like the
Virtual Room, we can look at a situation and have a good idea of where the problem may be.

Leadership role

If we don’t have that skill set, in a moment’s notice we can get one of our team members to jump
into the room with us, look at the desktop, look at the situation, and assess it with us. So, it's a
leadership role that we hold in our organization, in the massive technology world of HP, to go
out and grab those experts that you need and bring them to bear to the situation.

Chris Tinker: Dana, to your point, it's not enough just to know the technology that you're
responsible for supporting. For example, you’re tasked with having to know third-party vendor
technology, but you are also tasked with having to understand the technologies like HP Virtual
Room.

For example, Greg mentioned WebEx, there are many technologies out there, tools that we use
that HP doesn’t create and doesn’t support, but the industry as a whole utilizes on a daily basis.
I'm sure you're using one right now that’s either a freeware or a public license.

Greg Tinker: Take Outlook for example. That’s a tool. Today, everybody is expected to know
Outlook. If you find someone that doesn't know it, you then question their ability. Everybody
would. I'm using that as an example, but a lot of people take these types of tools we use today for
granted.

Gardner: While we are on the subject of tools, what's coming next? If I were to design these
types of tools, you would be the guys I would go to, to get my list of requirements. What are you
asking for? What would you like to see come next in order for you to be able to do your jobs
better?

Chris Tinker: The mind meld or The Borg.

Gardner: Reading minds, that’s a good one. More practical.

Greg Tinker: Now, there are some tools that are being leveraged daily inside HP as well as
outside. HP Storage Essentials being one. The biggest thing we see today is storage. The growth
rate of storage is enormous. And the biggest problems customers run into are performance and
capacity.

Capacity is the easy one, right? I am 100 percent full in my file system. I just need more. That's
the easy one to fix.

The hard one to fix is "My application is not running the way I want it to, Fix it." Those are the
difficult ones. We have to have a lot of tools to help us understand what the load conditions are,
because it's no longer the yesteryear scenario of a Superdome, HP Rack, one big behemoth
machine, four terabytes of memory, 400 CPUs, loading up one storage array. That's no longer the
case.

We have grid computing structures of 600+ nodes running a multitude of different things -- SAP,
Oracle, Informix, Exchange, etc. All of these different load-bearing concepts are coming into one
monolithic storage array. It can become quite daunting to understand what's causing that load
condition, and we have a lot of tools today that are helping us ascertain the root of those
problems faster.

Chris Tinker: We have become the bleeding edge of technology. Essentially, it's software that
hasn't been released. It's tools which are not actually production ready, and we use these tools as
well, and some tools we can’t even speak about.

Business realities

But, these are tools that will be in the enterprise eventually. They will be out in the world
eventually. You asked earlier what we see coming down the road? Imagination is essentially one
of the only things in technology. In today's world, there are other factors of course. Business
realities temper the development of technology, but it's going to be very exciting to see what
technology is being developed and what's coming next.

Gardner: While we're looking at what's coming next, you mentioned that level of interest in
applications not performing, a very general sort of problem at the surface. It seems to me that the
definition of application is shifting. As we look at more hybrid computing models, we look at
people who will be compositing from a variety of services, all perhaps coming from a variety of
sources. The business process needs to be supported, but the constituent parts now are even more
scattered, harder to identify.

It seems as if folks who are in your role are going to have an even more important play here
when it comes to these distributed and cloud and hybrid types of applications. Any thought about
what you would be needing and what to expect if that's the future?

Chris Tinker: Well, with performance, your key challenge is understanding what tools we use,
what metrics we look at. With databases, there are databases tools like AWR with Oracle. When
should I be looking at AWR, as opposed to the operating system performance metrics, as
opposed to the storage array or network performance?

It goes back to what Greg said earlier. It's having this very large breadth of technology expertise.
It's being able to understand first what tool I use to look at performance? Then, of course, you
have to go back to the business. You have to ask the business owners, the P&L owners, "What is
your expectation? What is actually your business challenge?"

Maybe it's a batch job. Maybe it's a report they want to run at month end. Maybe they want to
run a month-end processing for their business accounting, calculate payroll.The business has to
be able to deﬁne what it is they are going after. Their challenge is being able to align the
technology to deliver on that challenge.

Gardner: I wonder if you might have just some last advice for those listening to the podcast as
to how they on the consumption side might help folks like you on the services and support
delivery side do your job better? What advice do you have for them in order to have a better
outcome? Any thoughts on that, Chris?

Chris Tinker: Yeah, it's being able to articulate the actual problem at hand, and the challenge
that you have with your technology, because keep in mind that technology, IT, is nothing more
than a tool that allows us to have business outcomes. So it's nothing more than a tool that the
business utilizes for their requirements.

Then, to have metrics around their environment. They have to have a baseline. They have to have
an understanding of what the technology has been doing.

Trending is key

Greg Tinker: Trending is key in a lot of these new virtualized consolidated environments. You
need to have a baseline, as Chris stated. We need to have the performance characteristics. Your
logging and ESX is about as common as sliced bread in a grocery store. ESX environments are
very common and thought of very highly. I enjoy them. They are very nice.

Customers tend to start moving towards ESXi, which is ﬁne, but ESXi doesn't log. It does log
but you only get like a two hour history. The point is that customers take that logging for granted.
You have to have your logging enabled and you must keep at least a six month trend.

So you don't keep all your logs and your service forever, but a six month trend is very helpful
when you have a mysterious problem show up. Then, we can compare yesterday to today and see
what differences have shown up in the environment.

Gardner: It comes down to data, having the data at your disposal.

Chris Tinker: Not just data, but having a baseline. We get a lot of calls where customers have
no idea of what the environment was doing before. They say, "We're having a problem now. Our
users are complaining." We ask, "How did it used to run? How long did this job used to take?
Did it use to take 2 hours, and now it takes 20 hours?" A lot of times, they simply do not know.

I wish customers would yield to knowing that logging is critical. You don't have to keep it
forever, but keep it for a strategic period of time. Six months is a good number.

Gardner: So as we look at the benefits from a cost and performance angle of concentrating and
converging, you might increase your risk profile and become more dependent on folks like Chris
and Greg, but having that data and having an understanding of your baseline can help reduce that
risk significantly. That's good advice.

Terrific. I want to thank you two for your input and, again, congratulations on being designated
favorites at something that's probably, as I say, not a popular role. So to be popular in an
unpopular position really speaks well of you.

We've been listening to a podcast discussion on how IT customer support is growing in
importance and why the industry changes are flipped, forcing more work towards reducing that
risk, but with an emphasis on the people at the front line on your support services.

So thanks to Chris Tinker. I really enjoyed your thoughts.

Chris Tinker: Thank you, Dana.

Greg Tinker: Dana, thank you again for having us. I would like to add one more comment. For
those of your listeners that are willing to come out to the HP DISCOVER Event in Las Vegas,
Chris and I have multiple publications and we are giving multiple advanced session discussions
on internal I/O control logics at HP DISCOVER Event in Las Vegas, June 6-10. So, if any of
your listeners wish to come out and meet us firsthand, we would love to see them.

HP also has a site where you can connect with HP Technology Services experts. We encourage
your readers to engage with HP directly.

Gardner: Thanks to you Greg. We have been, as I say, discussing the support life and the trends,
and both of you gentlemen are HP Master Technologists. So thanks again.

Greg Tinker: Thank you so much.

Chris Tinker: Thank you.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. I've been your host
and moderator and you've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for
listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on rapid-response IT support on mission critical
applications and systems. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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