Some Halloween "fun"

If you thought IT guys were nerdy before, this tidbit will only heighten that image. Yesterday, HP came out with a series of animated YouTube shorts advising IT managers on how to run their data centers. The videos are an attempt to draw clients to HP's line of technology and consulting services to boost data center efficiency.

Resolving the typical issues faced by data center managers - including massive energy waste, inefficiency and security vulnerability - is certainly not as simple as getting one of those wire grabbers from Office Depot and pushing the tangled web behind a bookshelf (as I would do in my own home). But neither is it a pleasure cruise to watch these videos, which are a mix of old Scooby Doo cartoons and nearly unintelligible IT consulting jargon.

In the Halloween spirit, here we have a rousing cast of characters, all extolling the virtue of cleanliness is godliness in the server room. Frankenstein, who sounds like an awkward life insurance salesman, is an entity pieced together from many different vendors, and discusses the need to manage and support all the different pieces of the IT environment with an efficient service management process. The Blob, with an appropriately thick New Jersey accent, represents a data center gone wrong, resulting from IT managers who try to manage a new environment with old processes. Skeletons, forgotten servers in storage that feed on the data center's power sources, Dracula, the energy-sucking Vampire from the data center, and Werewolf, who tinkers in the data center, demand optimization of data centers' capacity and energy efficiency, as well as technology education training, to reduce costs and improve operations. Finally, ghosts, the most preachy of the bunch, sneak into data center, breaching security blind spots and vulnerabilities. These well-versed spooks, who must have picked up a graduate degree along the way, explain, "If only IT managers knew we could be stopped with effective security governance and banished altogether from your data center with proactive security and identity management software and services." (Fiendish Grinch laugh and ghoulish sounds steal the show.) With gripping dialogue like that, it's no wonder these videos haven't been picked up yet for a feature-length film.

Watching these videos makes us non-IT folks feel like outsiders at a meeting of the Dungeons and Dragons Fan Club, though it seems like they might be just the ticket in attracting the IT crowd. (As one techy told me after he saw the videos, "Good Lord, that was funny!") But for HP's sake, I hope these videos get into the right hands before they fall prey to YouTube buzz-kill. Comments posted by YouTube viewers don't leave much hope, though: "I honestly thought I was a huge nerd before I saw these videos. I now have to re-evaluate because who ever made this is at least 10 times the nerd I am." Or the more open to interpretation, "What.....?"