Archive for 17. February 2009

Celtics beats Mavs - how to beat the recession..

17. February 2009 by admin.

Last Thursday I was in AA stadium, watching the Mavs Vs. Celtics game… obviously rooting for Mavs… In the beginning Dallas had complete control of the game. At one point Dallas was 51-40 points ahead. But in the end, Boston won the game by 99-92..

Not that I am a sports pundit, but I am sure the secret of Boston’s success is tenacity, not giving up… During most of the game, Boston was outclassed by Mavericks. But the doggedness of Celtics players paid off…

This is how the present economic recession can be overcome. With persistence and patience we can beat the recession. I think if just continue to do our job (if we have them) we can overcome the recession. I still think it is self inflicted. More and more we scream recession, less and less we release money to the market and all of usgo down the spiral..

So go out and spend and splurge and bring back the golden time of consumerism… buy less expensive homes though…

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Green Computing: Is redundant network architecture really needed?

17. February 2009 by admin.

The other day I was talking to Khalid about Mr. Crofford’s blog regarding power consumption in our datacenter and he mentioned that we may cut down on cost (power/datacenter space) if we get rid of the redundancy. Later that day while talking to Rusty and Adrian, we came to conclusion that in some of our accounts, how active-active network configuration for load sharing/load balancing has added more complexity.

These made me think – which I rarely do. J I did a quick MTTR (mean time to repair) and MTBF (mean time between failures) calculations for Cisco devices and it seems that we can easily meet an

SLA of 99.5 % uptime with active/cold-standby network components. An

SLA of 99.5% uptime allows 43 hours and 48 minutes downtime annually which means one can have more than three hours of downtime per month.
As I read somewhere that the cloud is not a panacea. Yet migrating non-mission critical applications to the cloud can quickly reduce the customer’s capital expenditure.

Now imagine a specific cloud architecture (Infrastructure 3.0 or now being called IAAS – infrastructure as a service) which has less redundant elements which will result in a huge power savings over the year.

We can come up with processes and very tight configuration management (as per ITIL v3) that will allow us to swap out a failed piece of hardware quickly and meeting our SLAs.

Moreover if we have the right procedures, every two months or quarter we can bring up the cold standby and seamlessly failover from the active component thus making sure that the configurations are sync’d and not wearing out the same piece of equipment with overuse.

In this area the ongoing support cost (read human resource) will go up. But this may spur us to do more automation.

If anybody is interested and time permitting we can indulge in a full study. This may be one of the area where we can save some money for us and our clients by going green. We will do good both to our customer and to our future generations – what a thought!!

******Time to create few more Spore creatures to inhabit my Spore Ecoverse.********

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