What Are You Doing Right Now
-
@scottalanmiller said:
What is it running that it isn't replaced with a Raspberry Pi?
lol...
A host of various proprietary applications. It's not a question of performance, it's just that the code doesn't port easily. P2V is a no-go due to VMware not getting off their lazy asses and coding drivers for 20 year old niche UNIX platforms -- those jerks.
We have begun porting the applications to RHEL one at at a time, but it's not in production yet. There's a lot of kinks to work out for silly stuff like terminal emulation, printers, etc.
-
@crustachio But yeah. This server is the stuff IT nightmares are made of. We have almost lost it several times. Recently a weird utility power issue "backfed" (or something, don't ask me, I don't do high voltage) our emergency generator and killed it during a power outage. So when our UPS finally failed it took this server and array down, and it was NONE TOO HAPPY when we tried to bring it back online.
Thankfully we keep an exact duplicate on the shelf, so we did emergency transplanting (RAID controller died, along with some disks). Anyway, back up... for now. But yes, Sweaty Palms Achievement Unlocked.
-
That's nuts. I always wonder how companies get into a situation like this.
Because it means that sometime, twenty years ago, someone said "let's invest all kinds of effort into putting code onto a totally proprietary machine that we are 100% dependent on the vendor to support... forever." And then everyone else agreed. And then almost immediately that company went out of business. By 2001 this would have been an all out emergency in any business.. a totally unsupported critical system.
And for the next decade and a half everyone just depends on it and semi-ignores the fact that a very tiny decision window in the 1990s has caused almost two decades of crazy cost and risk and what took just a tiny bit of time to cause a problem has become decades of being unable to fix.
-
@crustachio said:
@crustachio But yeah. This server is the stuff IT nightmares are made of. We have almost lost it several times. Recently a weird utility power issue "backfed" (or something, don't ask me, I don't do high voltage) our emergency generator and killed it during a power outage. So when our UPS finally failed it took this server and array down, and it was NONE TOO HAPPY when we tried to bring it back online.
Thankfully we keep an exact duplicate on the shelf, so we did emergency transplanting (RAID controller died, along with some disks). Anyway, back up... for now. But yes, Sweaty Palms Achievement Unlocked.
-
@scottalanmiller said:
That's nuts. I always wonder how companies get into a situation like this.
Because it means that sometime, twenty years ago, someone said "let's invest all kinds of effort into putting code onto a totally proprietary machine that we are 100% dependent on the vendor to support... forever." And then everyone else agreed. And then almost immediately that company went out of business. By 2001 this would have been an all out emergency in any business.. a totally unsupported critical system.
And for the next decade and a half everyone just depends on it and semi-ignores the fact that a very tiny decision window in the 1990s has caused almost two decades of crazy cost and risk and what took just a tiny bit of time to cause a problem has become decades of being unable to fix.
Yep, that's pretty much it in a nutshell.
'course, we're government, so this kind of thing is almost expected
OTOH, I can't say I blame them. 20 years ago it seemed kind of like the wild west. Nobody was clairvoyant, who could have known which wagon to hitch up to. I'm not sure much has changed. How many Novell shops made the wrong call (that was us too :)).
For all we know, Scale Computing could be a non-entity 3 years from now. [I know that's not exactly the same -- even if Scale folded or was bought out, you would still retain VM mobility, but it was still a big investment]
-
@dafyre said:
@crustachio said:
@crustachio But yeah. This server is the stuff IT nightmares are made of. We have almost lost it several times. Recently a weird utility power issue "backfed" (or something, don't ask me, I don't do high voltage) our emergency generator and killed it during a power outage. So when our UPS finally failed it took this server and array down, and it was NONE TOO HAPPY when we tried to bring it back online.
Thankfully we keep an exact duplicate on the shelf, so we did emergency transplanting (RAID controller died, along with some disks). Anyway, back up... for now. But yes, Sweaty Palms Achievement Unlocked.
LOL... is this a thing, or did you generate it based on my post?
-
@crustachio said:
@dafyre said:
@crustachio said:
@crustachio But yeah. This server is the stuff IT nightmares are made of. We have almost lost it several times. Recently a weird utility power issue "backfed" (or something, don't ask me, I don't do high voltage) our emergency generator and killed it during a power outage. So when our UPS finally failed it took this server and array down, and it was NONE TOO HAPPY when we tried to bring it back online.
Thankfully we keep an exact duplicate on the shelf, so we did emergency transplanting (RAID controller died, along with some disks). Anyway, back up... for now. But yes, Sweaty Palms Achievement Unlocked.
LOL... is this a thing, or did you generate it based on my post?
-
@dafyre said:
@crustachio said:
@dafyre said:
@crustachio said:
@crustachio But yeah. This server is the stuff IT nightmares are made of. We have almost lost it several times. Recently a weird utility power issue "backfed" (or something, don't ask me, I don't do high voltage) our emergency generator and killed it during a power outage. So when our UPS finally failed it took this server and array down, and it was NONE TOO HAPPY when we tried to bring it back online.
Thankfully we keep an exact duplicate on the shelf, so we did emergency transplanting (RAID controller died, along with some disks). Anyway, back up... for now. But yes, Sweaty Palms Achievement Unlocked.
LOL... is this a thing, or did you generate it based on my post?
Bookmarked
-
@dafyre said:
@crustachio said:
@dafyre said:
@crustachio said:
@crustachio But yeah. This server is the stuff IT nightmares are made of. We have almost lost it several times. Recently a weird utility power issue "backfed" (or something, don't ask me, I don't do high voltage) our emergency generator and killed it during a power outage. So when our UPS finally failed it took this server and array down, and it was NONE TOO HAPPY when we tried to bring it back online.
Thankfully we keep an exact duplicate on the shelf, so we did emergency transplanting (RAID controller died, along with some disks). Anyway, back up... for now. But yes, Sweaty Palms Achievement Unlocked.
LOL... is this a thing, or did you generate it based on my post?
Sweet, I've been needing that.
-
@scottalanmiller said:
@dafyre said:
@crustachio said:
@dafyre said:
@crustachio said:
@crustachio But yeah. This server is the stuff IT nightmares are made of. We have almost lost it several times. Recently a weird utility power issue "backfed" (or something, don't ask me, I don't do high voltage) our emergency generator and killed it during a power outage. So when our UPS finally failed it took this server and array down, and it was NONE TOO HAPPY when we tried to bring it back online.
Thankfully we keep an exact duplicate on the shelf, so we did emergency transplanting (RAID controller died, along with some disks). Anyway, back up... for now. But yes, Sweaty Palms Achievement Unlocked.
LOL... is this a thing, or did you generate it based on my post?
Sweet, I've been needing that.
It's quite a lot of fun.
-
-
@scottalanmiller said:
Oh, lordy... I bet we're going to be seeing a whole rash of these over on SW now, ha ha.
-
My "uncle" is in the hospital in Rochester. He is 99 and this looks like it. His lung just collapsed and a kidney has shut down. But at 99, he's done pretty well. He's not exactly my uncle, actually my uncles brother in law, but effectively my uncle.
-
@scottalanmiller :(.
-
@Minion-Queen said:
@scottalanmiller :(.
Why the frownie face? You know he's been looking for something like this for a while, ha ha.
-
See @scottalanmiller's post above. I know of whom he is speaking of.
-
@Minion-Queen said:
See @scottalanmiller's post above. I know of whom he is speaking of.
I gotcha. I'll just hide over here in the corner and send over well wishes & prayers.
-
@crustachio said:
For all we know, Scale Computing could be a non-entity 3 years from now. [I know that's not exactly the same -- even if Scale folded or was bought out, you would still retain VM mobility, but it was still a big investment]
As you mentioned though - Scale is only hardware that runs software that can run on any number of other platforms. The software within the VMs aren't tied to the hardware in any way (unless you're using some crazy licensing that reads something from the hardware - and well,... lol)
-
@scottalanmiller said:
My "uncle" is in the hospital in Rochester. He is 99 and this looks like it. His lung just collapsed and a kidney has shut down. But at 99, he's done pretty well. He's not exactly my uncle, actually my uncles brother in law, but effectively my uncle.
Oh, yikes, I didn't see that a minute ago. Sorry, man.
-
@Dashrender said:
@crustachio said:
For all we know, Scale Computing could be a non-entity 3 years from now. [I know that's not exactly the same -- even if Scale folded or was bought out, you would still retain VM mobility, but it was still a big investment]
As you mentioned though - Scale is only hardware that runs software that can run on any number of other platforms. The software within the VMs aren't tied to the hardware in any way (unless you're using some crazy licensing that reads something from the hardware - and well,... lol)
Right, the difference is that the platform is not proprietary, nor is the VM format nor are the OSes running on top of that. My backups from Scale can be restored to Xen, KVM, Hyper-V, ESXi or even bare metal today if need be. The migration off from Scale to something else is no more or less effort than if I had already been on the other thing. It's just a backup and restore, at most.
The investment is in the existing compute and storage and support, there isn't any lock in. We definitely wont' be running the same Scale cluster in 20 years time.
The difference is is that we didn't invest anything in technical debt, we've not taken on platform risk.
