Derek J. Balling wrote: > We recently had a meeting between our data-center operations folks and > our bean-counters. The long and the short of it was, for companies > where they have SOX compliance to deal with, etc., etc., how granular > are other people getting on their asset tracking. > > For example,... > > - When you upgrade a server from 16GB to 32GB, does accounting get > notified that the valuation of the server has changed for depreciation > purposes? When you swap out the 146G hard drives for 300G hard > drives, is there any accounting controls you enforce for that type of > action? > > - Is there anyone who is ACTUALLY tracking their hard drives and > individual DIMMs through their enterprise, even if they were bought > separately later as an upgrade to an existing piece of hardware? > > - What do you do when you take that 16GB out of the server above and > toss it on a shelf as being obsolete? Does accounting ever know? or > care? > > - Do you bother to tell accounting when $VENDOR comes out and swaps > out a motherboard, changing the serial number of the hardware in the > process? (and yes, for some vendors, a replacement motherboard DOES > change the serial number). If you don't, doesn't that really hamper > the ability to audit the asset tracking when asset ID # N used to > belong to S/N XXXXXXX and now belongs to S/N YYYYYYY? > > - Do you tell accounting when you ship hardware from one colo facility > to another? > > We're trying to define our policies and controls in this area, and it > seems far-too-easy to get lost in the weeds of "what someone MIGHT > have wanted you to do", when there's probably some, much easier, "what > most people are doing" types of practices. > > Any thoughts, comments, suggestions, from folks who've been down this > road before? > > Cheers, > D
We used to do a LOT of this stuff at Auburn University, but more indirectly. We had to audit the machines for how much memory they had once per year and confirm the previous year's results (it was a spreadsheet). It was a little bit of remote collection using tools such as sysinfo to gather the data and compare it against the relevent columns. I do not recollect us doing this for disk space, only for machines. I don't know whether that was because disk wasn't considered a depreciable asset in the same way a machine was, or not. (I'm sure they had their reasons). They did not care about individual dimms, only how much memory was in a machine, and it's aggregate purchase amount. In terms of motherboards. 'We' care about that for purposes of tracking failures and such (to some extent).. At Auburn, the accountans cared about the machine number and aggregate value of the machine, so they used the chassis serial number as opposed to anything else. They think of things in terms of value of the chassis and its parts, we think of things in terms of what parts are broken. if the motherboard changed, the aggregate value of the chassis did not, so they didn't care. Re: location. That can vary.. Did it cross state lines? Did it cross country lines? Did it cross local tax-zone lines? How does the local tax zone levy taxes on things if any? (usually not at all) My current employer is rather opaque about this process, but, a lot of capital purchases are tax-free for us for various reasons relating to research. My previous employer also tracked asset depreciation based upon capital requests, and was fastidious about asset tracking tags (again, a separate sticket placed upon the chassis), but did not track upgrades. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
