Thoughts..

Mon Oct 17 14:31:10 PDT 2005

On Fri, 7 Oct 2005, Jennifer Davis wrote:

> So if given the thought "Critical Problems of our Industry", what springs to 
> mind?  What aspects of your job do you think "they" could do better, (where 
> they is the vendors or open source ventures that tackle some of the problems)? 
> What things do you bang your head on the table about, or find yourself griping 
> about yet again at the local coffee shop?

Scalability, particularly in the area of storage mgmt.  I was recently
asked a question in a technical interview which reiterated to me again
the issues we are having with storage--both in large orgs and small.
Basically--it was the usenet problem (many millions of small files), 
but with real files with real data, and it had to be migrated to another
file system--with no downtime.  A find on the filesystem took three weeks 
to complete.  (I was asked to explain why a find would take three weeks 
and to quickly "talk through" the various ways people might try to transfer
the data and whether they would work.)

Consider the decrease in the size of a file as a percentage of total 
storage space available, and the overwhelming amount of storage that
individual users have at their disposal in their non-work environments.
As an example, I have <$500 worth of disks at home, and have close to 
1TB of space.  It would cost me probably 4-6x that much to buy just the
tape drive to be able to back it up.

As a system administrator, I understand why my mail spool has to be
capped with a small quota, but Joe User with their 250GB Winblows 
box at home is a much harder sell.

The other problem I see continuously is mgmt drinking marketing
Koolaid and then trying to tell IT how to do it's job.  As more users
get exposed to more technology, the worse this problem will get.
They think they are experts b/c they help Granda and Auntie Em
set up their wireless network.  Thus, we just got a new OS railroaded
into $ork b/c some lab "tests" (which the SA's who support the
systems at $ork were never involved in--so you know no hard questions
were asked) proved that Oracle 11i "doesn't scale" on Solaris or
Linux.  ("Blade" Koolaid was involved you can guess the new OS
from that.)

=Nadine=