Thanks to Mike Marquez for pointing out to me that SysAdmin Day is tomorrow, July 28. Happy SysAdmin Day to Eric of MSA, Andrew of ISM, Jay of Opt3, the people at our co-lo, and to everyone else that is “In the Trenches (IT).” When the shit hits the fan, technically speaking, we appreciate the peace of mind that comes with knowing that you have it covered.
A data center in Downtown Los Angeles may boast about the multiple backup power generators they possess, but is it enough to deal with power problems that span the whole city for multiple days? Although problem scenarios may seem farfetched when an information architecture is functioning normally, problems do occur as exemplified by the extended power outage around New York City. Consolidated Edison, a 10 billion dollar company, was unable to provide highly available service. A majority of co-locations do not spend as much as ConEd to create an environment that supports high availability, and a majority of companies are not willing spend too much on minimizing downtime.
To minimize the cost while maximizing service availability, a solution for providing high availability should include at least two data centers that are in separate geographic regions. This is more advisable than building up a single super data center. As an example at a smaller scale, buying two servers and configuring them for high availability is cheaper and safer than buying a single server that is supposedly fault tolerant. A single server, by definition, cannot provide redundancy that is needed to foster high availability. When dealing with high availability, scaling out is simply better than scaling up.
Time has been scarce these past few weeks, and this week in particular has been the busiest. Recovery time from work has been compressed to approximately three hours a day. Each work day this week has started at approximately 6:30am. At that time, a 1.5-hour commute to Irvine begins. Then, approximately seven to nine hours of continous work is committed. Work is interrupted by a 1.5-hour dinner, and work resumes for about three hours before the one-hour commute back home. Another two to three hour session of work occurs before I sleep and recondition for the next day. Time for sleep has started between the hours of 11pm and 2am this week. This week has been very busy. More importantly, this week resulted in multiple accomplishments.
I was dropped into a somewhat alien environment and utilized as a resource to develop the environment into one of stability and normalcy. I believe I effectively used the resources that were made available to me, and these resources were vital to the timely completion of my objectives. I observed a lot of interesting things that I intend to examine in future postmortems.
After reading Ed Bott’s “Is Microsoft about to release a Windows ‘kill switch’?” , my only recommendation is that people take their money out of Microsoft and put it somewhere else. A computer that runs Microsoft Windows, pirated or not, is owned by a potential customer for software publishers that target the platform. Microsoft might be reducing software theft and pressuring people to get software licenses in order to increase short-term shareholder value. There is a slight risk of some consumers turning away from Microsoft, further reducing Microsoft Windows market share in desktop operating systems and making Microsoft more irrelevant. On a positive note, this may encourage software publishers to target operating systems other than Microsoft Windows and help foster alternative productivity environments.
There has been a lot of negative sentiment on technical support and customer care representatives lately. I’ve voiced some frustration with Sprint’s front-line technical support staff before. Poor customer service over the phone has also been publicized with Vincent Ferrari’s AOL episode as well as a recent video taping of a Comcast technician sleeping on a customer’s couch while waiting for assistance from his peers. Because people are likely driven by self-interest, there really is no reason for customers to give feedback for anything other than complaints.
This entry bucks the trend. I was recently frustrated with my DSL connection. I have had this connection for almost three years, and I have never before had a problem. My connection started dropping multiple times throughout each day. I reached for technical support at AT&T (formerly SBC). The phone support was mediocre, but the people that provided service at my house were exceptional technicians. Both of these technicians did their job above my expectations and perhaps outside of their protocol.
Now, my connection is stable, and I am a content customer once again. Their equipment may or may not have been faulty, but my home’s phone wiring is a more likely cause of the service disruptions. There were two ways to resolve the problem: go with cable or fix my inside wiring. Since the necessary wires were readily available, ahem, my inside wiring was fixed quickly.