Data Center Tour
Dick Corso and Ian Reddy
2004
Cisco IT
Data Center and
Operations Control Center
Tour
Process in the OCC:
Staff, Process, and
Ongoing Process Development
Page 1 of 13
Data Center Tour
Dick Corso and Ian Reddy
2004
3. Process in the OCC: Staff, Process, and Ongoing
Process Development
OCC Staff
Figure 1.
OCC Staff on the Bridge
Dick: “Now we’re inside the gallery behind the operations center. In this environment
we’ve got two or three people on shift at a time. During night shifts, we can typically
manage with two people, but depending on the day of the week, we may have three. We
generally look at it as a three-person model. Everybody on the team is cross-trained.
“The responsibility of the operations command center personnel is to ensure that when
something fails, a case is immediately opened and within five minutes they send out a
notice, telling people about the situation. They don’t ask questions—that’s critical to
managing the OCC—they just open the case as fast as possible.
“When they open a case on a failed resource, a notice is automatically sent to all the
people who are associated with that resource, so they can begin to take steps to fix the
Page 2 of 13
Data Center Tour
Dick Corso and Ian Reddy
2004
problem as quickly as possible. It’s not our job to identify these people; instead, people
who are responsible for that resource, or who are interested in finding out about the
health of that resource, subscribe to e-mail aliases that we use to alert them via pager.
That way the OCC staff can identify the Cisco employees interested in that particular
resource.
“Our OCC staff manages the case in our trouble-ticketing tool, from the time the alarm is
raised until the time the immediate problem is solved. They require the on-call support
engineers to phone, to get on the bridge, and not leave the bridge until after the problem
is resolved or they’ve negotiated with the OCC staff as to when they’re going to