50Micron.com

Point of reference – A few months ago I wrote a post that I never ended up publishing that started with the line:

“My gods I need to work with technology that wasn’t conceived of in the 1990s.”

With that in mind, in case you’re wondering where I’ve been this past month or so…

I’ve been playing with this beast…

8 Engine VMAX

225 400G SSD Drives (90 TB Raw)

Direct Attached to *ONE* host.

Biggest.  Thumbdrive.  Ever.

Well I was saying I needed to get some serious hands-on VMAX experience.  When you put a request like that out there, sometimes the universe answers LOUDLY.

This weeks abject failure of Amazon.com’s EC2 hosting environment has caused quite the stir.  There are those who say that this proves that this incident “Proves Cloud Failure Recovery is a Myth” and others who say that we should just give it a chance.

Facts are facts.  Amazon screwed the pooch big-time last week.  Their outage caused ripple effects nation-wide.  But while it’s easy to throw the blame at Amazon for the failure ti’s important to remember that cloud computing is still only in it’s infancy, this mad rush to adopt it is part and parcel of the reason these problems are happening.  Customers rushing for a new product creates demand, companies looking to be the first to capitalize on that demand create a product that may or may not be ready for prime time.

But because no-one ever (because it’s impossible) thought to test the kind of cascade failure they experienced, they were pushing the high-availability envelope right out of the gate.

So no big deal, right?  Foursquare, parts of netflix, etc. were down due to the outage.  Other than inconvenience and the inability of narcissistic people to let the world know where they are and what they’re doing, it’s not really that big a deal (for us)

And then this came out: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=65649&tstart=0

Specifically this line:

“We are a monitoring company and are monitoring hundreds of cardiac patients at home.  We were unable to see their ECG signals since 21st of April.”

Really?  You have a life-critical application and you hosted it “in the cloud”?  Did it never occur to you that it’s probably *NOT* a good place for a life-or-death application?  While I would consider it as a backup, definitely not my one and only.

People who know me know I have a rule.  I don’t say it works until I’ve seen it work at least once, and even then I’ll qualify my statement with “well I saw it work under THESE conditions.”  I do *NOT* say something works based on what some sales or marketing person tells me works.  (Trust me, this has been a major sticking point between me and my sales team.

That being said.  You have to accept that if you put your critical apps in “the cloud” by it’s very nature you are abdicating your control over it, and putting your full faith in someone ELSE to fix the problem.  Someone who may not think your application is as important as the one in the rack next to yours.

Are you going to take someone’s word that something is “Highly Available” if you haven’t actually pulled the plug yourself and watched it fail over?  I won’t.  I will candidly couch my answer in “That’s the way it’s supposed to work” or “That’s the way it’s designed to work”  But until you see a failover, that’s not the way it DOES work, because it never has.

I run my own email, my own webserver, my own infrastructure. I prefer it this way, because now if the system goes down, I know exactly whose butt to kick.

As a rule, and If I’m paying someone else to provide a service… I make sure I know where, how, and who to call when it blows up.  It’s probably the best advise I can give.

Amazon billed this as being “highly avaialble” and maybe it is, for the most part.  But obviously if you think of a million ways for something to go wrong, you can bet even money on their being at least a million and one ways for it to fail.

Instead of EC2, they should have named it “Titanic” because everyone knows the easiest way to invite disaster is to tell the world you’re immune to it.

It’s funny, but I always get this funny look when I talk about technology being alive, evolving, and maybe even slightly sentient.

This is a non-storage post, but I never claimed to write only about storage, just mostly.

We dumped cable TV today.  And it got me to thinking on how certain technologies just become obsolete after a while.

We did it because the only ones who watched TV in our house were our kids, and they only watched two channels.  Nickelodeon, and Nick Jr, and becaue Nick Jr was a part of the “premium” cable package we ended up spending $100 a month or more so that my 5 year old could learn Spanish from a diminutive latina with a talking backpack and an oddly-dressed monkey for a friend.

Now they get that same education from the same shows, but they get it from Netflix streaming through the Sony Playstation.  Net cost $16.99/month.

But the cost savings are only part of it.  My kids are no longer assaulted by endless advertising, commercials for shows that are NOT on their age level, and are no longer scheduling their lives around what shows come on at what times.

It really is an amazing freedom when you think about it.  And it definitely signifies a technology that is finally moving away from “the way it’s always been done” to ways that may, finally, make more sense and put the consumer in control.

In a world where bandwidth is cheaper and cheaper, it really surprises me that more people aren’t making this change.

I’m a bit of a stick in the mud when it comes to change.

I dislike it.

A *LOT*

So what did I do…gave up my years-long love-affair with Blackberry and bought a new Android-based phone.

I’ve sort of had it spelled out to me recently that I resist change even when it makes sense.  Fearing the unknown and all that.

So this is my gesture. 

I managed to hit Sprint.Com during one of the 18 whole hours they had the HTC EVO in stock.  My son wanted to spend his end-of-year-report-card-money on one and in playing with it in the store, I had to admit I was pretty impressed.

First off the screen.  The EVO sports a 4.3″ diag. screen which puts the rest of the droid-based phones to shame.  (Even the new HTC Droid “Incredible” isn’t so incredible at a paltry 3.7″)

Setup was easy, but not as easy as it could have been.  After several unsuccessful attempts at activating online I was forced to call in.  The unsuccessful activations were due to the fact that the phones were tied to the number they were purchased under, and I was trying to cross-activate them.

So far so good.  The only notible exception is the inability to sync my windows “Notes” using exchange active-sync.  I depend on those pretty heavily so will have to find a work-around for it. 

I’ll update when i actually get a chance to use this in a “work” situation.