Giving Thanks To Our IT Infrastructure

Of all the traditions that surround the Thanksgiving season -- time together with family and friends, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and gorging on a usually socially unacceptable amount of food -- the best of all remains its namesake: giving thanks. In honor of this year’s most gratitude-filled holiday, we at SolarWinds asked our THWACK community of more than 130,000 IT professionals to share with us what thanks they would give to their IT infrastructure, if only they could.

The responses we received, which are represented on the following slides, are sometimes funny and sometimes sentimental. But taken as a whole, they help to spotlight the challenges we modern day IT professionals face day in and day out, including the challenges of monitoring and managing increasingly complex IT environments.

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Thank you, dear network

Thank you, my dear network infrastructure, for always staying so reliable and for your blazing fast packet transmission speeds, no matter how many people blame you for literally everything  -- and how loosely we follow your preferred cabling best practices.

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Thank you, all you indispensable applications

While it’s true that the network, physical and virtual servers, storage, and the database are all incredibly important, the reality is that the business runs on applications. Of course, without the other layers, applications wouldn’t work, but I want to specifically say thank you, applications, for all you do to keep the business on track and for your usually pretty good performance. I know it’s not actually your fault when you’re slow; I’m looking at you, database).

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Thank you, virtualization, for being you

Thank you, virtualization, for freeing me from the chains of hardware bondage, saving me space in the data center -- as well as my back. I can quickly spin up a VM without having to provision new hardware and without having to wait for a new procurement to come in. And I’ll do better at monitoring to keep your sprawl in check from now on; I promise.

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Thank you, IoT, for keeping things interesting

Thank you, industrial IOT, for making my job oh so unique and varied, and for providing the need to deal with equipment that, quite frankly, nobody would have ever guessed would need monitored or managed by the IT department.

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Thank you, my wonderful VPN

Without you, I wouldn’t be able to work from home in my jammies.

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Thank you for freeing me, Bluetooth

Dear Bluetooth, thank you for keeping cords from choking me.

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Thank you, redundant hardware, for the extra sleep

Thank you redundant hardware for being there in a pinch, which allows me to get extra hours of sleep while you recover from events that would have previously gotten me up at 3 a.m.

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