Ms. Z. Arsenault is an IT consultant working in the depths of a large North American energy company. She’s one of those brave souls who works away in the background, keeping the servers running, making sure all the pieces fall properly into place so when the employees wander in each morning their applications run as expected. It’s often a busy job just keeping things on a steady path. But Ms. Arsenault and her team aren’t just maintaining the status quo, they’re also trying to improve performance and cut costs while maintaining a stable environment for the end user. This week I had the opportunity to talk with Ms. Arsenault about what’s she’s been up to in the depths of corporate IT.
OSNews: Let’s start off with a little bit about you and how you got into the IT field.
ZA: I was born in a small town from the east coast of Canada. When I was 18 and graduated was when I started trying to decide what I wanted to do in my life for a career. Computers were never a huge part of my life growing up, although the more frequently that I was around them, the more computers intrigued me. I decided to move to Calgary, Canada to go to a Technical Institute, about which, through friends of mine, I had heard good things. I graduated in 2001 with a Degree in Computer Sciences. After a few months from graduating, I worked in an entry level tier 1 Help Desk position, and eventually started in a tier 2 level Help Desk support role. After a few years of working there, I moved to a west coast city for a year where I worked in a tier 2 level Desktop position. A year later I moved back to Calgary, Canada and started work at an energy company, where I started on a combined tier 1 and 2 level support, with quite an open policy on supporting the desktop until the issue resolved. I had learned a lot in this role, as most of my job was hands on hardware support, which I had never had too much opportunity in my previous roles to dig right into. After a couple of years, I got word of a tier 3 role for Web Application Server Support/Administration. This goes hand in hand with the Java development I was taught in school, so figured it would be a great opportunity to venture into, and that is where I currently work. And so, here I am now, talking to you, and discussing my IT experiences.
OSNews: That certainly brings us up to speed. Please tell us a little about the environment you currently support.
ZA: Well I work in a large energy corporation, so the environment is quite large as well. There are approximately four hundred production servers, and possibly a thousand or more servers when you include testing environments, in this company. That being said, due to some users requiring more than one desktop at their desk, I could safely say that there are probably close to four thousand desktops, maybe more. My team of six, alone, supports around 40+ servers. I work in the Web Infrastructure department. There is a mix of Windows PCs as well as Unix/Linux desktop systems in the company’s production environment.
OSNews: What has generally been the most challenging aspect of running such a
network?
ZA: The most challenging aspect of running such a network is getting certain parts of the business to adapt to newer/supported versions of JDK. This would mean migrating their applications to said new versions. They understand the logic of migrating but they are just never ready to adopt these changes even though they say they understand the ramifications of keeping older unsupported JDKs.
OSNews: You mentioned (pre-interview) your organization is looking at making a
move to Linux servers. What operating system have you been running and
what prompted the change?
ZA: It was time to upgrade a good number of our applications to a higher JDK which is not supported by the version of Web Application Server I was using. Ever since before I started with this organization, they had a mix of operating systems, ranging from Windows 2000 Server, 2003 Server, Solaris, and Red Hat. To keep a consistency in our environment, I felt a need to decide upon a single operating system to run our environments from. This helps with some automation I have in place for log rotations as well as a front-end GUI I had built as the “middle man” between our developers and deployers.
OSNews: Which brand of Linux is the company looking to implement and why?
ZA: Most of the servers I have built for are being shared by multiple applications so I require a hearty and stable operating system. With that in mind, I have decided on 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (kernel version 2.6.18). The servers usually have 2x CPUs and have around 8GB of RAM. I try to get away with 50 GB of disk space. I have jobs that run, which regulate any of the disks from filling up with logs, by archiving them. I will usually build a web application server on these boxes with either
Tomcat 6.x for simple Java applications, or for more of a heavier load of applications containing EJB or Cluster requirements, with Weblogic 10gR3. When Oracle bought out BEA, costs for the use of Weblogic in production environments rose quite high, so I only use it when I feel it is necessary to, and not as our primary application server.
OSNews: Will a change in operating system also mean rolling out new hardware, or will you try to keep the same servers?
ZA: Some of the servers I have in the environment are physical servers, and some are really old. I have not been keeping those for the migration, unless necessary to. Generally I have been using virtual machines using VMotion for many of our shared application servers. Also, the high costs of Oracle products is why I have chosen to use Tomcat for any non-cluster-required apps, as currently I don’t have many of them.
OSNews: What has the learning curve been like for the IT staff? Is there a lot
of new training involved to handle the new OS, new applications?
ZA: There is always room for training for anyone. I try to document everything in enough detail that even a newbie could jump right in and start operating the environment. I take pride in my documentation skills, because I know from experience that individuals with a strong IT background and a strong documentation skill-set, are sometimes hard to find.
OSNews: If we look at the total cost of the old system verses the new, is there a benefit of one over the other?
ZA: I decided that virtual machines (unless a physical machine is absolutely necessary) would suffice for our new servers, and in turn this decision helps the company with saving quite a bit of money on hardware. This also helps with the ease of scalability, more so than a physical server.
OSNews: Ideally, users don’t see any (negative) aspects of a change. What sort of steps/tests are the IT team taking to ensure a smooth roll-out?
ZA: When performing a migration, I have a strict process in place with a multi-tier environment, as well providing development, testing, and production lines. I always build a development environment with the same operating system and configurations I would have in Testing, as well as Production, but still with the flexibility to try new things. It is not necessarily a proof of concept (POC) server for the developers; I actually have one of those as well. They do still need to run any operating system or third-party requirements/additions by me before moving forward. I have documentation available to developers explaining the environments, and what we will provide for a service, where the logging will be, and how I prefer that they configure their data source access, etc. That way, there are no surprises and I have a consistent environment. It really adds ease to the transition. All developers develop differently. If I provide guidelines, from past experiences with successes and failures, then they may learn new things too. That being said, I am always up to trying new things as well if any are brought to the table, but this would be by starting in our POC server.
OSNews: Has your team run into any challenges with a heterogeneous (and thus complex) network?
ZA: When I first started on this team, there was horrible documentation and no structure. It was extremely challenging for anyone new to just jump in and understand the environment, because it was everywhere, and not everything was clearly documented. This has gotten better with time but the organization, as a whole, is implementing more of an executive focus on each I.T. team’s documentation by setting up a “timer” which flags documents older than a few months. This is helping with making sure that I keep up to date with my documentation by writing up Runbooks for my environments, for example. The organization’s Documentation QA is going under some great improvements so it will just get better.
OSNews: Is your organization considering a similar migration for the company’s workstations?
ZA: I’m not really sure, this is a department of which I am not part of anymore. If anything, the desktop team just makes sure to simply provide the user with an upgrade to the newest supported and approved desktops on an individual basis if issues are encountered which may require a substantial amount of time to resolve.
OSNews: Is there anything else you’d like to share? Are you working on a project in your spare time?
ZA: To add to my last answer about desktop migrations… once older computers fail, encounter software issues or are just simply unsupported and old, my company donates what they can to charities and schools and if not, then recycles.
As for other projects outside of work, I don’t have any at this time. I am quite comfortable here, but now that the environment has a better structure and consistency, for some people it could get boring… If moving to a new client to spice up my work life is what has to happen? So be it, it will just keep me on my toes. That is an important quality in a person within the IT industry, right? Being open to change!
OT and sexist–and will most likely be downranked to oblivion, but she is in my top 3 list for attractive women in (real) IT.
You have what I would call a solid philosophy on your migration. Our “company” is currently evaluating various OS software and contemplating migration of several non-critical departments to OS.
I wonder what growing pains have been encountered with these heterogeneous system.
The problem our company has encountered is the large number of proprietary apps REQUIRED by most of our critical departments. Best case scenario indicates some sort of bastardized domain and support system. So much for saving money when you spend it all on retraining your tier 1 and developers. Management promises to cut costs when we are literally doubling our support vectors.
[edit: because I can r have proper grammar]
Edited 2010-04-14 22:11 UTC
As for your first sentence, you were not alone, just more vocal.
Anyhoo, my favorite part of the interview was her attention to documentation. That one feature is sorely missing in programmers, system admins, DBA’s, etc. Many a catastrophe, night of wicked debugging, or mutilated migration could have been spared by a dose of documentation. All us geeks are probably nodding our heads, but do we really hear? It’s part of being a professional.
‘Nuff said.
I got bolloxed at work for “wasting time” writing Javadocs today … I kid you not.
A programmer I’ve worked with used to say “everyone wants documentation, no one wants to pay for it.”
I’ll pick properly coupled code with good descriptive variable names over the average javadocced code anyday.
Javadoc describes your attributes, which is a good thing if you are coding an api. But to use it to make somebody understand your code it’s useless. it does not describe the structure and logic behind your classes.
I’ve seen too many getFoo() functions with the the javadoc comment “gets foo”. Try to pick you variable, class and method names so they don’t need any javadoc.
I agree; our coding standard requires us to do what you have described, but I always try to use descriptive names…
… however I like to describe what the method does before even writing it, helps me think through the logic before I even start coding. Sometimes I write some pseudocode or draw a diagram, depends on what I am doing ultimately.
On the other hand, if you pose for a glamour shot to accompany your interview, then I guess it’s not a problem if the readers notice that you’re attractive.
I’m not saying this particular lady does so, but I believe that if you’re an attractive woman (or man), then there’s no shame whatsoever in using that asset to gain an advantage. If men are stupid enough to get wrapped around fingers (and we are), then that’s our fault, not hers.
The big problem for me in this statement is – that it’s sadly true!
Generation after generation of women grow up with exactly THIS firmly entrenched in their brains. And you know what? They hit a wall when they turn 40. Because “being attractive” goes away at some point.
Qualification and competence, ability to work alone and/or in teams, willingness to adapt and learn new stuff, maybe being polite. This is all that should matter.
But the rolemodels just aren’t there. And so we see the next generation of girls growing up. This time with “Germany’s next topmodel” on the TV screens, Rapvideos where the girls are nothing but “hoes” to a “pimp”, and so on.
Breaking this cycle is almost impossible. Sadly.
Obligatory link:
http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/817880750_tKpQa-L.jpg
I don’t agree. If you are a men is stronger than a woman, is it her fault? By that logic you could beat her if she is not strong enough to defend herself because that is her fault.
There’s aline to draw. In my country, discriminating based on physical appearance is illegal and I think it is a good thing. On the other hand, I believe it is a shame to use your physical appearance to gain an advantage over people.
Edited 2010-04-15 05:41 UTC
You have a point there…. except in this case the photograph wasn’t taken for the interview. Sadly, I’m not that good of a photographer.
Yes, it is terribly sexist of you. This is OSNews, where we deal with 1’s and 0’s, and not much else matters. A person should be taken seriously based solely on competence, and it’s pathetic that you’d rank her by her looks. It’s out of place and inappropriate.
Also, are you thinking what I’m thinking? Add some Sarah Palin glasses and a margarita?
“…top 3 list…”
Yes, quite cute – but if you really want to meet beautiful IT women, pick a company (in the US that is), which specializes in Women’s apparel – who you’ll meet there in IT will simply blow your head off: beautiful, educated IT specialists, and your competition is gay or married…
Red Hat has such a compelling story. They are cheaper, offer great long support and 100% FOSS stack long term strategy (that includes the possibility to use CentOS once you have enough in house knowledge)
I don’t see RH making 6.66 billion a quarter like MS, but in the very long run I don’t see how anybody can really compete with them.
PS. And I knew when I saw the photo that sexist comments are a likely possibility, but I hoped OSnews was better than that.
What’s there to be “better than that”? Considering her sexy is much more humane than considering a mobile phone sexy…
Still.. a good gadget is sexy too, as is she…
Plug for FindBugs (http://findbugs.sourceforge.net). It’s worth it just as a CYA to run Java apps through and automatically document problems. Next time you get a call about your “terribly performing servers,” you can start with the app performance itself.
We use it… sometimes it seems painfully slow but I guess it is worth it.
Heck, we run our entire projects through Sonar with a few plugins (including findbugz).
Before sonar, I’ve personally used findbugz for a few years, and found it -really- helpful in hunting down race conditions in code I inherited from other devs.
… but I’m moving to Canada.
Nice!
Commenting that the WebLogic prices rose considerable after the ORacle takeover…
I’m sure their Oracle Sales team will be making a call with their ‘new’ prices soon for Solaris as well.
70% of the comments would not exist.
Even if I hadn’t seen the picture, I was still thinking that it sounds like an easy job.
My $.02
<I’ll skip the details of my job vs her job>
The frog, the scorpion, and the river.
It’s true. Taller people make more money. It’s not their fault they are taller. It’s not their fault they make more money. It’s the Personnel department and the tall person’s bosses that decide how much they make.
We ALL use what we have to make more money. If we have low self esteem it works against us. That’s just fact.
I do not think less of any woman who is very attractive. I would not give a woman a job just based on that. I wouldn’t give her a job based on her having the same qualifications but just being better looking.
For me, and this it for real, personality wins out every time. If they are good looking but unpleasant to be around. They lose. If they think people owe them things because they are good looking, they lose. At least with me.
I’m tall and I could go to my boss and threaten to beat him because I’m obviously stronger than him. That could make me more money indeed, but I don’t.
In my country, there is a law that an employer is obligated to consider anonymous resumes. You can send your resume with no picture and no name and he has to consider it. If he receives someone with lower qualifications for an interview but not you because you didn’t send your picture, you can sue. There are also a set of 18 attributes he has no right to discriminate against, including gender and physical appearance. You can also sue if he discriminates for other attributes that are not related to the job.
Unfortunately, it does still happen. I’m sorry but that’s just not acceptable. You can not say “that’s life” and get along with that. That behavior is to be condemned and the perpetrators should face the consequences of their judgment. Look at what happened in the last century. If you let it slip, it slips. First the bad looking people, then the old people, then the disabled, and then it’s you. Any discrimination based on something not related to the job should be reported and condemned.
What is the news here? Some woman works for some power company? That is news?
At my previous workplace they had either no documentation or really old documentation. An emphasis on documentation can go a long way to improve IT especially as the systems can be very complicated.
I work as a developer in corporate environments, and I couldn’t agree more on what she says.
My job would be a lot easier, faster, more productive, if only the infrastructures on which I work were only half as good as she describes.
Something that happens often? We send screenshots of bugs to other teams, and they still says it’s OUR fault.
Jeri Ellsworth > Ms. Z. Arsenault
Wait, what was the topic again?