IT Architect Resources, LLC announces the release of book 4 in the IT Architect Series, IT Stories from the Field, Vol. 1.
The book can be found on Lulu.

“What is it like to be engaged on an IT project when it turns into a horror story?! Thirty-five prominent IT professionals describe their most challenging datacenter projects and provide insights into why failures occurred, including lessons learned and what they would do differently. Recommended reading for members of the IT community who deliver IT solutions in the field and want to avoid learning the hard way….”

Editor in Chief Matthew Wood, Editor and Project Lead John Arrasjid, and Editor Mark Gabryjelski have worked with over 35 individuals to create this work of stories related to project design, implementation, and operations related to IT Infrastructure Design.

Each story has information tied to a failure, and includes lessons learned based on hindsight from our experiences. The stories provide insight on resolving problems tied to people, process, and technology.

The contributors have their biographies on the IT Architect Resource website, itaseries.com. They include managers and individual contributors. Their roles include that of an architect, project management, and more. Each story is told from the perspective and writing style of the contributor. Story contributors include:

Abdullah Abdullah, Johan van Amersfoort, John Yani Arrasjid, Steve Athanas, Marco van Baggum, René van den Bedem, Doug Baer, Daemon Behr, Hans Bernhardt, Michael Berthiaume, Jayson Block, Wayne Conrad, Paul Cradduck, Sachin Dharmadhikari, Tony Foster, Mark Gabryjelski, Faisal Hasan, Ray Heffer, John Kozej, Christopher Kusek, Sean Massey, Wences Michel, Christian Mohn, Geoffrey O’Brien, Josh Odgers, David Quinney, Bas Raayman, Yves Sandfort, Rachit Srivastava, Jorge Torres, Raman Veeramraju, Matthew Wood, Szymon Ziolkowski, Chip Zoller.

The artist Ioannis Dangerous Age created the book cover artwork. Art prints and other options will be available on his site
www.dangerousage.com.

Reviewers: Dorine Arrasjid, Steve Bochinski, Kirkland Brown, Darrel Carson, Kenneth Moore, Rudi van Drunen.

What is it like to be engaged on an IT project when it turns into a horror story? Here are some of the questions that are answered through the stories told.

• What do you do when you are asked to design a resilient and recoverable datacenter in a war zone?
• What happens when your VDI launch fails because of the missed requirement that your customers did not want to mention?
• How do you deal with scope that creeps all the way from a Proof of Concept to production?
• How do you respond when a small underground transformer fire initiates a cascade of events that threatens to take down a major data and communications center?
• How do you recover when a ransomware attack locks out all of your corporation’s Windows computers, including computers at 50 remote branch offices that require site visits.
• How do you salvage the project when the Project Manager from Hell commits to an impossible schedule before you have even finished gathering requirements and designing the solution?
• What happens when your risk assessment identifies a potential water hazard in a datacenter and the customer decides not to mitigate the risk?
• What is the impact when you deliver a new Cloud Management Platform and discover that key stakeholders were not included when the requirements were gathered?
• Can you deliver an effective solution when security is so tight that requirements are not fully disclosed and you are not even permitted to observe the tests you provided for the solution you designed?
• What is the cost of ignoring a potential single point of failure when snow melt drips along an improperly sealed air conditioning cable and through the main (un- virtualized) file server in a datacenter?
• Can your datacenter migration succeed when lack of preparation and due diligence pushes Murphy’s law into overdrive?

The stories demonstrate what can go wrong and paths to prevent or resolve the failures experienced. For those new to the field of IT design, implementation, and operations, this will provide you insight into issues you may encounter in the future. For those with experience, this can be fun reading while serving as a reference for the types of challenges faced.