Working within IT over the years I have had the ‘privilege’ of crawling my way around cold or worryingly warm dingy comms rooms, filled with various contraptions that I pretended to understand; all lit up like Christmas trees decorated with meandering garlands of Category 5 cables that resembled a terrifying snake pit in an Indiana Jones movie! Some really messy dustbowls in which one wrong pull or trip could’ve taken down a mission critical system of one sort or another, or some angry salespeople trying to get that last-minute deal clocked in but got disconnected due to a clumsy IT plod with their Size 10 boots! Nothing to see here…!!!
Infrastructure
Thankfully, I seldom enter datacentres nowadays, mainly due to them being more secure than Fort Knox and IT becoming more commoditised and structured due to the advent of Cloud C
omputing whereby they can’t be frequented by any old Taran, Diljit or Harinder! We are not quite there yet (in terms of buying IT as a service), however the Guru Ghar does have an IT infrastructure that has, let’s just say, ‘evolved’ over the years!
Structure
One of the principle aims of the D&T team was to introduce structure, organisation and governance. Our Guru Ghar should replicate these big datacentres in our very small way, let’s create a space, that although not usually seen by most, adheres to the cleanliness and tidiness as per the rest of the Guru Ghar. Our core group of sevadars leading this effort have been using this period of lockdown to structure and organise the comms and media rooms. These rooms may seem unassuming, but they now form part of the core fabric of the Guru Ghar’s technological infrastructure.
The network architecture has been re-designed to ensure all systems are connected to the backbone. The services provided rely on a reliable and scalable infrastructure to deliver data across the gurdwara and beyond to the outside world.
Working Hard
Our sevadars have been working hard in tidying up the cabling, and creating low-level design documents that will not only benefit existing teams, but ensure continuity and easy transition when sevadar teams change.
Smart
The infrastructure is integrated nicely with smart apps that allow sevadars to remotely monitor and administer the equipment; thus the team can view dashboards to view uptimes and status’s of the systems and can get alerted if anything goes down, the goal here is to automate remedial tasks to avoid delay and unnecessary intervention of a sevadars.
A lot of effort and rummaging around filthy cables resulted in cabling being tidied, assets being tagged and logged in an asset management system enabling central control and governance for Gurdwara assets.
Sikhi
It’s been great to see the effort made by our youngsters to get involved, and even get some work experience whilst doing so. In the case of Tanvir Singh here, who in between his school work has been helping out with sorting out the physical infrastructure. He sees this as a great opportunity to not only give back but learn new skills that are relevant to the outside working world, and ready-made content for his own CV. This is where our modern Guru Ghar is heading towards, somewhere you can not only make a difference to the community but learn new life skills; isn’t that what Sikhi is all about…?!
Our sevadars are giving up precious time to align ourselves with the changing technological landscape. In the space of six months much has been achieved, and it’s striking how a such circumstances that have befallen our whole world have also focused our minds and efforts to make things better; from Langar seva, to the Granthi jis and beyond; and together with our elders, the youth really have stepped up to the plate to create a Guru Ghar befitting of our times…
Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji ki Fateh…
Comments