Is it supposed to make me feel better about getting my problem fixed if I’m talking to someone in the Midwest versus someone in Bangalore? (Please no hate mail – I’m from the Midwest.) Honestly, I just want my computer to stop showing me a blue screen of death.

But apparently, I might be in the minority. According to the Black Book of Outsourcing (yes, outsourcing has a black book), reverse outsourcing is on the rise with “India’s leading service providers opening offices on Main Street, USA” to be closer to customers (mainly North American) and draw from the “local talent pools”.

The one area of outsourcing bucking this trend – infrastructure management. Co-writer Scott Wilson says that infrastructure management is largely automated, low touch and does not involve a lot of interaction.

Speaking as a vendor of infrastructure management tools, that’s a bunch of malarkey. Perhaps at a very low level this is true (i.e., is the device responding), but that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to monitoring performance, availability and SLAs for today’s networks, systems and applications.

Certainly as vendors, we try to put as much automation as possible into our toolsets – helping our customers to simplify IT management wherever possible, enabling them to be proactive by setting up “intelligent” alarms and thresholds that warn of problems before they become showstoppers and reacting at a speed in this increasingly virtual world that simply is not possible for human manual interaction.

But infrastructure management doesn’t happen in a vacuum and you can bet when something goes wrong which affects some mission-critical app state-side, that there is a LOT of communication and interaction. And it takes a lot of work and setup to get to a level of automation where the alerting is proactive and intelligent and customized for each business.

One of the main points of tools like ours is to automate where possible in order to free up the valuable time of the sysadmins, network engineers, IT managers, etc to do the higher order work – which is how they’ll get to the next level of infrastructure management. Beyond “is it up”, infrastructure management should be providing answers to questions like: “is it always up”, “is it doing what I expected it to do” and “will it still be working as expected as my company grows”.

Beta Information

This article discusses a beta release of a Microsoft product. The information in this article is provided as-is and is subject to change without notice.

No formal product support is available from Microsoft for this beta product. For information about how to obtain support for a beta release, see the documentation that is included with the beta product files, or check the Web location where you downloaded the release.

INTRODUCTION

This Microsoft Knowledge Base article will be updated with more information about Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2) and Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2) when the information becomes available. Currently, the product release notes and related information about Windows Server 2008 SP2 and Windows Vista SP2 are not available.

Baltimore is one of what I believe are still three test markets that will go into commercial availability, albeit as much as a year after initial plans, and then months delayed after revised plans were announced. Still 2 to 4 Mbps is far above the level that current cell technology can achieve as a consistent range.