| 4.6 Operations Manager: | | 1. An Operations Manager is responsible for fixed assets as hardware infrastructure and associated operating system software. A mission is to minimise the capital and operational cost of these fixed assets over the long term. Everybody else in the business need computing intrastructure costs to tend towards zero - computing units of power are always reducing. | | 2. Data centers are run by professional Operations Managers who dream of a quiet life with very litle to do. In practice, this role is very reactive to events, incidents and problems. When an incident is not in progress, time is spent analysing and learning from past incidents and planning how to react best to similar incidents in the future. |
| | | 1. Objective: | | 1. To monitor and control all IT services and IT infrastructure. Not just hardware, but certificates, licenses, domains and the majority of security inventory documentation. | | 2. The process of operations management executes day-by-day routine tasks related to the operation of the infrastructure equipment and application services. Tasks include job scheduling, archiving, print and monitoing user behaviour. |
| 2. Domain Marketing: | | 1. Do not confuse marketing with a domain name - any domain name can be marketed with very little relevance to the actual domain name. | | 2. With business-to-business applications, the domain name is of no consequence, other than to be short and memorable. |
| 3. Domain Brokerage: | | 1. The world wide shortage of meaningful domain names has created a massive commercial market. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has added to this market where domain names that are more than 5 years old are assigned a higher ranking. The value of premium domain names has increased by 50% in the last 2 years and this rate of increase is expected to continue. |
| 4. Data Centers: | | 1. If Operations Managers had an infinite budget and could replicate all hardware in all locations, then major problems may be resolved very fast, but they still need to be managed. With the very best equipment we can buy, equipment will fail from time to time and manual action is needed to have it replaced. A problem arises when it is not self-evident that a piece of equipment has failed, it may be running very slowly in error-recovery mode and causing delays. |
| 5. Domain Suffix: | | 1. The NET and COM domain suffix is reserved for operational data centers with a home page that sends people to the domain portal such as DOMAIN.CO.UK. The CO.UK and EU domain suffix are interchangable with many other suffix values such as ORG, MOBI, BIZ and INFO. As a general policy, do not lease a domain unless its NET, COM and CO.UK suffix are available. |
| 6. Domain Mapping: | | 1. Each application service at each data center has its own domain name that does not change for any operational reason. It can take 48 hours for a domain name server to populate a new IP address thoughout the world and then longer for local caching to be flushed - changing an IP address can have significant operational issues. | | (1) Each application service is accessed via a portal CO.UK domain that will direct a user to a production data center such as NET or COM. The home page is raw HTML that avoids logging and database dependencies - the correct domain and sign in page is hard coded. The sign in page expects a c1 parameter from the home page containing the current date. If a user bookmarks the sign in page, the link will fail when the date changes and they will be sent to the home page. | | (2) Each application service has a site map that includes a link to the local sign in page for test and demonstration purposes only. A test and demonstration message is shown on the top of every page when the user is not signed into the production server. | | (3) DOMAIN.CO.UK runs on a local server as raw HTML without a database - the home page has a hard coded menu to send users to the sign in page of the production server. Other domains such as DOMAIN.BIZ may emulate the role of DOMAIN.CO.UK. These domains may contain a full test environment where local sign in is via the site map. | | (4) DOMAIN.NET runs in an operational data center. Its home page has a hard coded menu to send users to the sign in page of the production server. | | (5) DOMAIN.COM runs in an operational data center. Its home page has a hard coded menu to send users to the sign in page of the production server. |
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