What would Taylor look for in a data center?
by
Charlie Bess
I was in a discussion the other day about the parallels between installing hardware in the data center and assembling products in a factory. It made me think about Frederick Taylor and the work he did with time studies for manufacturing.
I made the analogy that cables are like fasteners for manufacturing. We should try to minimize them. They slow down work because they need to be attached, sometimes with special tools ... manufacturers try to minimize fasteners, and use other snap together techniques. If I'd been thinking a little quicker, I would probably have used hoses as an example!
With blade servers, one of the big advantages is that you can snap boards into place and the network, power ... are built into the frame, minimizing installation and maintenance time. You don't need to keep running from the front to the back of the machine.
I wonder what other analogies we should be using so that we could leverage what's learned from manufacturing. A couple of years back, I did a series of posts (here and here) about fads and how they are usually executed from manufacturing first and then the rest of the world catches on.
