Data Center Smart Hands – Advantages and Differences to Remote Hands

When you deploy your IT infrastructure to a data center, unless you’re in the same building as that data center, you’re probably going to need some remote help. For instance, if you need to swap out a hard drive, even if the data center is across town, getting there takes time and pulls your people away from more important tasks.

If the data center is in another state, you definitely need remote help. Data centers are certainly multiplying, with Gartner estimating that the world is home to nearly 3.5 million data center sites. Most data centers let you choose between “remote hands,” which refers to people performing basic tasks, and “smart hands,” which can handle more complicated issues.

What is Smart Hands support?

Smart hands support is an on-site technical support service for data centers that provides a higher level of expert service than is available with remote hands. Offered by data center operators and co-location facilities, smart hands services includes troubleshooting and resolving complex issues, such as configuring network equipment.

Examples of Data Center Smart Hands Services

A smart hands support definition​ is easier to understand with suitable examples. There are many, but here are a few highlights of what a smart hands technician may be tasked with, in an IT smart hands role:

• Installing and configuring equipment—This process may involve expert-level skills related to verifying functionality, tuning performance, and connecting with other hardware.
• Troubleshooting—Things will always go wrong, and when they do, a smart hands tech can investigate and diagnose software, hardware, or network issues that require physical access to the infrastructure to detect.
• Installing and managing cables—Cable management can be a challenging workload in a modern data center due to high equipment density, obstructions to airflow, and space constraints.
• Racking and stacking—This means unboxing and standing up equipment in racks, e.g., storage devices, servers, network switches, etc.
• Setting up and configuring firewalls—This is a skills-intensive and sensitive task, and mistakes can lead to disastrous outcomes. For a sense of scale, Microsoft’s Quincy, Washington hyperscale data center contains 24,000 miles of cable!
• Installing, patching, and updating software—This task can be critical for security and reliability. Patch management also ensures your data center systems are performing to the best of their abilities.

Other smart hands tasks worth mentioning include conducting inventories and audits, relocating or changing equipment, testing equipment, shipping and receiving, and rebooting equipment.

5 Advantages of Smart Hands Solutions

Smart hands solutions offer a range of advantages for additional data center support. Here are five of the most compelling:

1. Efficiency

Smart hands IT services are more efficient than alternatives. For instance, hiring a service provider to visit the data center and deliver support on an as-needed basis is not as efficient as using a smart hands tech, in terms of time and money. Neither is it a good use of your people’s time to go to the data center if a smart hands tech can handle the task on-site.

2. Rapid Response

A smart hands company typically offers a rapid response, such as 8x5xNBD, when issues come up in the data center. This is not automatic, and agreements need to specify response times, but generally, an on-site smart hands tech can often respond to a problem much more quickly than your own employees.

3. Stronger Security

Done correctly, smart hands support translates into a stronger security processes. This outcome stems from several factors, including faster and more consistent security patching and faster response to security incidents that could damage data on infrastructure devices.

4. Scalability

Having a smart hands tech handle your complex data center support tasks enables you to scale your infrastructure footprint more easily than if you had to grow your own team.

The data center operator hires the professional services team and the operator can then deploy smart hands techs across multiple data center sites. This enables you to scale your infrastructure horizontally (between data centers) or vertically (more in the same data center) without having to worry about support.

5. Expertise You Don’t Have to Hire

Letting the data center operator hire the smart hands team eliminates the need to recruit more staff, which incurs hiring and retaining costs. Given the challenging state of IT recruiting, this should be welcome news for IT infrastructure teams.

4 Challenges Arising with IT Smart Hands

Smart hands support comes with its share of challenges. Some arise because smart hands creates a trust-based relationship between your company and the data center operator. Navigating that relationship successfully involves careful attention to detail and a commitment on both sides to making it work.

1. Variations in Skillsets

It’s a relief for you not to have to hire your own data center support team. However, within an infrastructure environment, you will have to find people to perform in a variety of skilled roles.

They will be facing the same recruiting challenges as you, and if the data center operator is not on top of this responsibility, the smart hands support team may exhibit gaps and variations in skillsets that will negatively affect their quality of support.

2. Managing Communications

The successful delivery of Smart hands services​ requires effective communications on both sides.

Issues can include establishing a clear understanding of task priorities and sharing the necessary technical details so the smart hands tech can do the job properly. In these instances, a purpose-built smart hands technology ticketing tool facilitates this communication process.

3. Reliance on a Third Party

Adopting smart hands support means that you will be relying on a third party to take care of data center tasks affecting potentially critical IT assets. As with any third-party relationship, there is the possibility for disagreements and dissatisfaction going in both directions.

One key to success is to focus on the business relationship and commit to keeping lines of communication open and resolving conflicts as they come up.

4. Potentially High Costs

Smart hands support services can be costly, or at least appear that way. This is a problem with many comparable IT outsourcing services, where you could pay an external party several times the hourly rate you pay your own people.

It’s important to budget accurately for the service and learn to anticipate what services will cost. At the same time, it’s valuable to assess what your true costs would be if you carried out your own data center support. Factoring in costs for internal employee travel time and other tasks not getting finished, the savings from keeping support in-house might be small.

Best Practices when Using Smart Hands Support

Succeeding with data center smart hands support services must involve adopting best practices. The good news is that many companies have worked out what can go wrong with smart hands, so there’s a growing body of best practices you can draw upon if you want to pursue smart hands.

Choosing the right provider is the foundation of other best practices for smart hands. Selecting a good smart hands provider is partly about standard IT procurement best practices.

It’s essential to go further, though, and investigate the vendor for specific experience and expertise that matches your needs, for example:

• Do they have proficiency with your tech stack, hardware vendors, and so forth?
• How are they when it comes to security and compliance?
• What’s their reputation for adhering the service level agreements (SLAs)?

Defining Goals and Expectations

The relationship between your organization and the smart hands service provider will go well if both sides can make their goals and expectations clear at the outset. This includes detailed, honest discussions about the scope of services.

For instance, will the service include hardware maintenance? If so, what does the maintenance plan look like? How will each side be sure it’s being followed? Communication channels and procedures also need to be clear.

Customizing the Service Offering

It’s possible that the provider’s basic suite of smart hands services will be adequate for your infrastructure. Customization may be necessary, though, to align the support services with your specific needs.

For example, if you require a certain level of system performance, such as storage inputs/outputs per second (IOPS), then the smart hands provider needs to commit to taking steps and using equipment that enables you to meet that goal. Integration between the smart hands provider’s management tools and your data center management tools is also likely to be an element of service customization.

Establishing a Clear, Effective Service Level Agreement (SLA)

A legal agreement for smart hands IT services should specify service levels in detail. Chances are, the data center operator provides an SLA that explains how quickly it will perform certain types of tasks.

As the customer, however, it’s your responsibility to understand what you’re agreeing to when you sign the SLA. It covers issues like guaranteed response times, weekend hours, and so forth. The escalation process should be clear for issues that cannot be resolved by the smart hands provider. The SLA should also deal with penalties for failure to meet the agreed-upon service levels.

Maintaining Oversight and Control

Professional services overall are not a “set it and forget it” service. Rather, it works best when the provider understands that you, the customer, will have oversight and monitor their performance.

This can take various forms, but usually, there should be some regular reporting on how well the provider has done with tasks, e.g., are they doing them on time and at a satisfactory level of quality? A formal audit may be part of this process as well, especially if the infrastructure is subject to compliance.

Remote Hands vs Smart Hands

Remote hands and smart hands service can sometimes overlap, with providers offering what is essentially remote smart hands support. However one main area of differentiation relates to the benefits of each service type – remote hands are good for streamlining basic operations, while smart hands allow for fast, efficient resolution of complex problems in the data center.

The below table outlines some of the key difference between smart hands and remote hands:

Remote Hands and Smart Hands Data Center Support from Park Place Technologies

Whether you’re looking for a more basic remote hands support, or an advanced smart hands company, Park Place Technologies can be your partner every step of the way.

Our team of technical resources can perform a variety of IT infrastructure-related tasks, complemented by a ‘pay-as-you-use’ payment model, ensuring that your costs are optimized. We can even offer same-day support, ensuring your in-house IT staff’s priorities are not impacted by being sent away to remote locations to perform routine tasks.

What’s more, our entire suite of IT Professional Services can facilitate smoother infrastructure operations for your team, from data center relocation, IMAC services and wireless transformation -we have you covered.

Interested in a comprehensive array of smart hands or remote hands services? Contact our  Professional Services team today.