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The New IT Crisis
Matey-O writes "You've succeeded in delivering 5 9's, your server farm is a well oiled machine, the helpdesk lines lie dormant. No? Well then how do you get credit for the work you do, when all that's noticed is the downtime? When the IT budget has to be justified, and you're overworked, undermanned, and you have to apply three patches to 100 servers before Close of Business, what has to change in IT before we melt down? Marc Andreessen has an interesting article on what has to happen to IT next."
Well then how do you get credit for the work you do, when all that's noticed is the downtime?
I feel that if I work hard (and smart enough), then I deserve free time every once in awhile. After all, I earned it.
But, managers don't understand this. So, I relax by reading The Onion or Freshmeat at work, but always make sure my hand can quickly hit ALT+TAB to get back into my work window (usually Emacs).
and you have to apply three patches to 100 servers before Close of Business
Not flaming, but a fact.. Microsoft SMS will get that done for you with a couple of clicks.. literally..
And we're expecting to receive a beta copy of SMS 2003 (incl. Active Directory, the big feature).. so i'm kind of looking forward to that..
I have to say.. even though we run 2000 on our servers.. SMS is a dam good product and a timesaver!
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
Since when do telephone systems maintain themselves? Last I heard, my voice was still running along wires and branching about in switching stations. Unless I'm mistaken, they still require maintenance. Granted that the operating costs have been reduced (fewer operators = fewer wages), but you could take a similar stance on IT. What about self-help forums where you can search a knowledge base to find answers? These can replace a lot of man hours of technical support work. There's always going to be some kind of human element to whatever equation. We're never going to find empty power plants that can generate their own electricity indefinitely, because there's always going to have to be human intervention.
Some businesses demand complex solutions, and I fail to see how these complex solutions are going to be met by turnkey solutions -- where a manager can go out, purchase a server, turn it on, and have it run his business for a year without any kind of customization whatsoever.
Ok. Just becuase it Marc Andreessen doens't mean that it's news.
This is an editorial, not an article.
How about talking about Grid computing. Or Organic IT. Developing systems and monitoring capabilities that go beyond telling you things are down, or when they're too busy. They actually add capacity on the fly through virtualization, taking from inactive systems to cover for the active system.
I think Marc once had a vision, but I'm not sure how strong of a visionary he is these days...
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
Ok seriously, does anyone RTFA anymore? How about the comments? This is a clear PR stunt aimed at producing more leads for Marc's new company. And ZDnet, that fine bastion of even-handed IT reporting, has once again saved us all by printing only the relevant facts. Just once I'd liek to believe that one of my old IT heroes didn't sell out and become a corporate whore (can you say RMS anyone?).
-- People who think they know it all, really annoy those of us who do!
what has to change in IT before we melt down ? Lots
What WILL change? nothing
for every burnt out admin thats going to quit theres 5 more waiting to take his place
good companies keep good employees
eather your not a good employee
or your not working at a good company
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
I think a better point to critique on his phone analogy is the implied point that the phone system isn't held together with "bailing wire" or "chewing gum." Nope, it's all pretty standardized, well-integrated equipment. Why is the phone service so much more "professional" than IT services?
;^)
Because phone service is a relatively well-defined, consistent, limited problem domain. Internet servers, dynamic web sites, and local security are loosely-defined, constantly shifting, open-ended problem domains. They're very different, and you can't compare one to the other.
However, for certain applications, there are well-defined standards, and well-defined practices. Still, for a lot of IT, it's a matter of custom engineering and architecture. For example, online content management: you can buy one of the management engines off-the-shelf, which will probably do most of what you need in a structured manner. For CRM, well, there's about a dozen of those. These packages are well-behaved in that it provides a well-defined interface, but that's not always an option (i know, i used to do data migration for small- to medium-sized businesses. at the low end, when you change systems, you'd better damned well know perl or some other text processing language to massage the data--that is, you need to be good with your bailing wire).
In the future, this situation will hopefully be better with standardization (mostly using XML it seems, even though the actual encoding doesn't really matter.. we could have standardized years ago, but nobody saw any benefit then). Having done data migration in the past, i'm all for keeping things disparate and non-standard, but that's because the work pays well and is fun
A better analogy might be a pool of corporate autos. Except that you don't have to interconnect the cars to get them to share load dynamically, or access content generated on one to form a report on the other, etc. A lot of IT is like trying to drop a big old hemi into a metro, or getting a suburban to go anywhere with just metros to provide power (two in front and one in back, it might go up a hill!).
Overall, I was not impressed with this article, but I'm afraid it's going to carry more clout than it should. oh well.
a) The phone industry had one task to do - get data over wires from point A to B, and however they did that was fine - users wouldn't have to be retrained if you replace old cables with fiber optic. That task is relatively simple, compared to the complexity of what is running and being distributed over the internet today. Automation works best when the target is static and clearly definable. I'm not sure either applies with servers/IT/internet.
b) A significant amount of trouble with maintaining systems comes from having to figure out lots of different pieces of hardware. Lots of random equipment makes IT support a great deal more difficult. There are two solutions:
1. Standardize all company hardware on a small number of systems/components, say one type of desktop, one type of server, and a few special purpose machines, and then only support those. Tools like VASystemImager then can make tasks like upgrading and bug fixing vastly simpler.
2. Use inexpensive thin clients interfacing to some powerful central server, ala Largo, and only have to maintain that central machine and swap out cheap, dumb clients. Also simplifies things tremendously.
People will no doubt point out that you have to run different types of OSs for different jobs and so on, but you can still use the central server/thin client approach and just make the connection to whichever OS you need transparent. It takes thought to set up, but once it is working you don't have 4000 individual support headaches to deal with. Only a few machines to upgrade, support, etc.
Unfortunately, this won't happen. First, you would have to have a truly MASSIVE infastructure upgrade, which replaces a working system. Riiight. Second, you need to have management willing to try something new and be patient to wait for the long term results. That's not how they think - they think next quarter profits. There is also sheer mental inertia to contend with.
It would be much easier for new companies to adopt this idea from the get go, than for older companies to adopt it. That may be where new, useful IT principles get applied.
The only way current companies will do something is if the system BREAKS, and I mean just totally stops functioning. Thats when they will wake up to the fact that significant changes are needed.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Ok, I read through the article and came away with absolutely no information. He says some things we already know: data centers are expensive, IT people are overworked, and the rest of an organization only notices the technology folks when something breaks. So, what should we do about it?
.NET environment. It's basically the same as Java applets, but they call it "Smart Clients" to give you the impression that it's something they invented. Sounds a lot like Network Computing to me -- which simply means that Network Computing is a good idea after all! And now that Microsoft has "invented" it, the idiots who make up most of the world may finally start to adopt the idea. Make the desktop a stateless device like it was 20 years ago when we all had dumb terminals on our desks, and IT overhead will drop like a rock.
Well, here's where you expect an innovator like Andreesen to come up with a brilliant idea that's going to begin the next IT paradigm shift, but all he says is that we need to find some revolutionary way to automate our own stuff -- basically, to automate the act of automating things. And how? Well, he doesn't really know. He makes some vague reference to sending out automatic updates to hundreds of servers at a time, and that's it.
Real bright there, Marc. Automatic patches and updates. As if that's the answer. In the real world, you don't have a huge farm of servers that all run the same patchlevel of the same operating system. I've got a few hundred boxen behind the glass, for example, that are a mix of Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows 2000, and Windows NT. And I'd guess that at least 50 percent of them would experience some sort of problem if we were to just push updates out to them unattended -- different applications require different patchlevels and break on others.
Let's not forget the fact that there's more than just servers. There's infrastructure such as routers, firewalls, and switches. And of course there is the dreaded desktop, which is probably the source of 90+ percent of IT headaches. Until the IT world wakes up and gets the hell off local desktops, the maintenance nightmare will continue. Seen what Microsoft is doing lately? Their vision of the future is one in which applications are loaded through a browser and executed in a local
The other trend you're going to start to see is outsourcing. People are realizing that it's expensive to build and run a data center. Fortunately, you don't have to. All you have to do is run your servers at a hosting center that knows how to do outsourced IT (as opposed to just hosting web sites, like the first generation of centers like Exodus did).
There are ways of streamlining IT after all. Unfortunately, Marc Andreesen didn't touch on any of them. I give this article a "C minus."
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Wow, that was insightful. So you mean IT is overworked and that the it'd be nice if IT could become a more automated process? Wow Marc, you've really stunned me with your insights!
DUH! I mean c'mon, the reason why IT is such a mess is because all the IT staff are being expected to do more with less and do it faster. They are overworked fighting fires which means they aren't given the resources to do advanced planning and put together systems that would really get things right. He makes it sound like this is the responsibility of the IT people, but it's really the responsibility fo the business as a whole to have some foresight and help these IT people out.
Overworked sysadmins do what has to be done to keep something working RIGHT NOW. Sysadmins with some free time will spend their efforts writing scripts, automating tedious tasks, and making sure fires don't happen. When fires do happen, they have the time to deal with them effectively because they've had a chance to automate a lot of the other tasks.
I have known many a sysadmin and I have never met a one who wasn't constantly pissed off because he lacked resources. A friend of mine was sysadmin for a company that wanted to have 24 hour uptime for their systems. He was the ONLY sysadmin. That sort of crap happens constantly in the IT world because the other members of the company have the wrong atttitude about IT, that it's an expense. If they looked at it like they look at factories and buildings, as an infrastructure investment, then you'd probably see a lot more happy IT managers out there.
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This is what feeds Andreeson's IT crisis today: the fact that technology professionals took their apparent suffering and feelings of being not understood, and used it to isolate themselves. They refused to act like businesspeople in an organization that lives and dies by its profit and loss statement. They complain about how management doesn't appreciate them, but how many learn to do a cost analysis that will show the business reasons for buying software X or hardware Y? In other words, the glorification of the geek in the 90s gave a lot of geeks the idea that they didn't have to learn the language of business to survive there. That's why they're underfunded, underappreciated, and harassed.
I've had the benefit of a boss who demanded a business analysis for any significant technology initiative at the company. He doesn't get computers, but he understands ROI. He understands a well-presented business case for anti-virus software. We have a wireless network in our new facility in Texas for a real-time inventory management system for one reason: my cost analysis showed that the implementation costs would be recovered within a year because of labor saved from eliminating batch-mode downloading, and that the cost over five years of our wireless system was ~15% of the batch-mode system.
When geeks figure out that they have to speak the language of the business, then the IT department gets properly funded, properly respected, and properly treated.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
is the one you never see. That idiot running desk to desk doesn't have any idea what they are doing. The one that shows up at 8 and leaves at 6 and appears to be reading screen after screen of pr0n. That SA is the bomb.
Worship the SA, do not replace the SA with a small shell script.
This
Seriously, I don't get the money to buy redundent Cisco routers. I don't get to buy extra switches and motherboards.
And the little internal web addy, that has been in place for 2 years? Some tool of a manager who is having a hissy fit, just walked into my office and asked why I haven't fixed his problem that he never told anyone about.
Please......
Whenever you are dealing with people who have almost as many deadlines as you do are involved. Things are never that easy.
Now where I will agree with you are scripts. Learn them. Use them. Love them. But do you have an IDS system? Who verfiys those alerts? Who checks your server logs for descrepencies? Admining is rarely easy.
I'm not drunk, I just have a speech impediment. And a stomach virus. And an inner ear infection.