Meet a Colocation Administrator

Tell us about your role.

Our team provides on-site colocation support for SIG’s remote data center environments. We are directly involved with these environments, from the requirements, planning, and build out, through maintenance, restructuring, and sometimes decommissioning. Our day starts around 9 a.m. by following up with emails, since all our inquiries come in through a distribution list. We troubleshoot any issues and then post things on our internal dashboard to plan out that night’s work. At 11 a.m., we do our team scrum to decide what sites we need to visit for a particular night and assign which team member will be responsible for each. We often work at each site individually, but we still act as a team. If someone finishes early or another teammate runs into some issues, we are always willing to help each other out. The rest of the afternoon is spent on side projects and fielding last minute requests. Smaller individual projects might be focused on automation. For larger projects, we work as a team and assign one person as the “Project Manager.” Those projects might consist of swapping out hardware, so the PM would manage a spreadsheet of everything that has been completed, as well as what still needs to be done. Our role requires good communication and attention to detail. Around 2:30 p.m., we start prepping to leave for our particular site. We work on very critical systems, so we won’t even open the cabinet doors until after 4:00 p.m.

What projects and experiences have been most rewarding for you so far?

I was given the task to create a tool that would gather how much power is in use and how much is available across SIG’s data center environments. We wanted to maximize efficiency, but were challenged with different hardware at various sites, so it wasn’t possible to obtain the power information in a unified format. To solve for this, I built a tool that queried the power feeds over the network from all of SIG’s data centers, accounting for varying source formats, and wrote it into a database for storage & future analysis. It was definitely challenging at first, but I was able to complete it and we ended up rolling this out at all our sites.

Tell us a fun fact about yourself.

Outside of work, I’m a musician and have been playing drums for many years. Recently, I’ve also been learning to play guitar. I’m practicing for a future Music Night, an open-mic night some SIG employees put together.