Change!!!!
I am just going to say it, Change!!!!!!! I hear it from both sides all day long. You change something and it broke this or we better move this change up because something is going to break. I am the type of person the likes change and knows sometimes change is for the better. There is many reason why I can think change is good or could be a great thing. Here are my thoughts and please don't think that I am saying we should all think this way or judge me because I like change.
You have a equipment that is 4 to 10 years old and is no longer supported by anyone? Change it. Doesn't hurt to replace the hardware, software or technology. We have come a long way since the early 20's when it was installed. Drives are faster, the newer hardware uses less power and cooling or the newer software has worked out all the bugs 20 services packs ago. Its okay upgrading you environment is okay, sometimes you will upgrade and make that major change and think we should have done this 5 years ago. I mean going for 3 cabinets of storage that have 7.2K or 10K drives and 14 ESXi host to 4 ESXi host with storage and compute all in one with all SSD drives. It is not just faster but reduces the energy cost to run it.
Software upgrades, many people think just because the application is running and has been running that way for many years why change it. While one, Red Hat 5 went out of support back in 2011, Windows Server 2003 is not just 15 years old but it went out of support in 2015 and only because Microsoft had so many customer not willing to change to 2008 or 2012. Do you know how hard it is to find software to protect your old servers, it is hard! I mean sure if you are running Server 2008 R2 "keep in mind, end of support 1/21/20" or 2012 or 2016 or 2019 "that will be releasing soon" you can find any anti-virus or backup system without paying a lot of money or having to go with a company that was isn't that good.
If you main or core systems that run your company are 10 to 20 years old and no longer support. Do you worry about the what if's.
What if my data center catches on fire?
What if we get a crypto virus?
What if we get breached?
What if the hard drives fail and we have to restore, but we only do file level backups instead of at the VMDK level.
Well guess what, just because we upgrade to that new backup solution and CHANGED the way we do backups. We can now not just restore that server fully but we can do it faster and get it back into production with little to no data lost.
There are hard parts about change in IT, when some people are completely against it and some people are for it. You ask me why is it hard. Well when you are for change and your systems and support is here ___________
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|_______________ the people who are not okay with change are here, things start breaking like Microsoft Load Balancing or servers that are in a physical blade chassis with 7 GB C: drives, or linux servers with no antivirus.
I going to end it with a saying that most or all IT people should know or live by or understand, "CHANGE IS WHAT WE DO!" The world never's stops changing, life never stops changing, technology never stops changing, so why should we.
