Aug 10
We all know the term: “Idiot-proofing” Making a job or a task so fool proof any idiot can do it. It seems I’m asked every day to “idiot-proof” some process or another. Make it so the Jr. guys can handle it. make it so they couldn’t break it if they tried. Make it so we …
Aug 27
When I used to teach, I always told the story of making the roast. It’s a parable, but it works. As follows: I was making a roast one day, and I cut the ends off it before i put it in the pan. My kid asks “Why did you cut the ends off the roast?” …
May 21
It’s really easy to point-and-click yourself to a leased cloud or public cloud infrastructure. Throw a credit-card # in and you can start working immediately. But it has to come down to the real question. Should you? Putting your application “In The Cloud” whether it be Google’s new service, Amazon, or anyone who you rent …
May 26
Every time I turn around it seems I seem to be running into the same question. Is it better to be multi-vendor or single source? Well the easy answer to that is, it depends. Different vendors do things differently, work better/worse with some hardware, etc. The arguments in favor of a single-vendor solution is easy. …
Nov 04
Ok, I can say it in a sentence. A contractor is someone you hire to do a job, a consultant is someone you hire to fix a problem. I’ve done both, but in the last 8 years I’ve been primarily a “Consultant.” My job is to fix whatever perceived problem. Some companies might have a …
Oct 23
Ok, I have no problem with tape. It’s a *GREAT* backup medium when your requirement is portability for massive amounts of data and you’re not replicating said data. If I had to ship 400TB of backups to Iron-Mountain, to protect against the earthquake-to-end-all-earthquakes tape would be my FIRST choice (though maybe, as a GIANT CAVE …
Sep 16
Ok, that was too cutsey for such a classy establishment. When you’re building a SAN, everything should play together, in the same SAN box if you will (with my apologies to QLogic.) When you start putting in multiple stand-alone SAN islands you increase your maintenance overhead exponentially. You also prevent the very thing that make …
Sep 15
The fundamental difference between BACKUP and ARCHIVE. A backup is there to help you deal with a crisis such as “My datacenter is a smoking hole in the ground now what do I do?” or something not quite as dramatic like “A virus ate my data.” You recover from the backup to the last known …
Aug 31
Ok, I’m curious as to whether anyone has an answer for this. Why don’t more people boot VMWare ESX from the SAN? It occurred to me the other night that I have 2 36G drives in each of my servers that I use possibly 10G of, when I already have a High-Availability storage solution at …
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