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January 6th, 2010 by Scott W.
You can’t open a browser or read a technology magazine without seeing something about the cloud. What is the cloud and what is the big hubbub? I am not able to pinpoint a definition of the cloud, but I think the impact of the cloud is getting clearer. Computing and communication will be sold on a usage basis much like water and electricity. This clarity elucidates a fascinating point that in our future we will buy more services and experiences than products and physical objects. If this comes to fruition, are we losing out on the physicality of life? Or have objects always been a symbol of experience? Because the symbols can be converted into zeroes and ones and sent across the world in seconds, does it mean they are less meaningful than physical symbols?
Computing and communication previously required a significant investment to have useful tools. Today, most mobile phone providers will give you a phone and charge you for the service for committing to a one or two year contract. A good computer system can now be purchased for around $500. Instead of buying shrink wrapped software, you can get your e-mail for free, and pay a monthly or yearly fee for backups, customer relationship management, and home finance software. Companies, of course, love subscriptions for the reoccurring revenue and consumers enjoy fixed rate fees over time instead of large one-time charges.
So with these enablers, we can now send photographs to each other on phones and computers. We can send digital cards and flowers to each other. Music no longer needs to be purchased at a store on a shiny disc of digital data. So what are we buying today? What were we paying for in times past?
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Tags: cloud, virtualization
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October 28th, 2009 by Scott W.
Be careful about the distinction between uptime and high availability. One should be the goal of your server infrastructure. The other is just a geek bragging right.
Many system administrators will brag about their systems having high uptimes. The uptime of a system is how long it has been running without a reboot. The current longest running uptime, as being tracked by Uptimes Project, is a VMS cluster that has been up just shy of 12 years as of the date this blog was published. Since we strive for 100% uptime, shouldn’t this be an impressive record to share with all of your friends as an exemplary form of sysadmin kung-fu? Actually no, never rebooting your systems fosters a “if it ain’t broke don’t fix mentality” that carries quite a few risks:
- First, if a machine has not been rebooted kernel, OS, and application patches are probably not being kept up-to-date. In today’s age on the Internet this can be a very dangerous practice. Your systems may be vulnerable to known exploits. In addition, if you run into problems with your system, your vendor will require applying recommended patches as a first course of action. It’s better to have these things taken care of before adding to work during a problem. We’ve seen out of date Windows servers need over 4 hours of patches requiring multiple reboots.
- Second, you’re potentially leaving around rotten Easter eggs. By rotten Easter eggs I mean changes to systems that don’t make it through a reboot: production services that should be running, startup scripts that do not work properly, IP addresses that have been added, speed/duplex issues that have been resolved since the machine has been up. So worst case scenario is that your server goes down (either planned or unplanned) and after the reboot you have a server with poor network performance, not all IP addresses are alive, and the database application isn’t running. If the reboot was not planned (a crash) this adds to the confusion when trying to bring the system back online.
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Tags: high availability, uptime
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August 26th, 2009 by Scott W.
Today’s websites are expected to be available 100% of the time. The Internet has connected a global marketplace of consumers and businesses where any amount of unplanned downtime can be disastrous for retail orders and/or reputation. If you desire to have a highly available website, study this list of the three reasons websites fail:
1. Management, developers and administrators aren’t invested in disciplined change management.
If you want high availability, you must manage your changes. A stack of shiny hardware alone does not provide uptime. So the last time you suffered a web site outage and during the problem your developers and admins were all claiming innocence that nothing changed, well, odds are they are lying. After you discover the cause, you get the same song and dance, “Oh, well that shouldn’t have caused a problem.”
Anyone with experience in IT will intuitively understand this truth. Luckily, we also have some data to back this up. Donna Scott, VP & Research Director, Gartner, notes that, “80 percent of unplanned downtime is caused by people and process issues, including poor change management practices, while the remainder is caused by technology failures and disasters.” I think our unwillingness to address this truth directly is because we’d rather blame some “system” or “hardware” for root cause rather than the people who should be held accountable for uptime. Throwing money at software and hardware will not solve people problems. Buying the super redundant n+4 failover hot-cold-warm standby solution won’t fix the problem that “Jimmy type-twice-think-once” has root (Administrator) access to the production environment.
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Tags: development cycle, uptime, virtualization
