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How Do You Keep Up with Enterprise-level Tech?
E1ven asks: "I'm curious how the Slashdot gang chooses to keep up with the performance of high-level equipment for servers, routers, loadbalancing, and the like? For PC-type specs it's easy, every guy and his dog has a review website, and magazines stuff themselves in every window. However, the higher-end equipment is far more difficult to find trustworthy analysis of.
I'm curious how other people have solved this problem, and what resources they use to keep on top of the game?"
I buy what the vendors tell me to buy. After all, they know what's best, right?
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Get a tech job at a major enterprise and let them educate you on the subject. It worked for me...
Depending on the environment you are in, you aren't making significant purchases that often. When you are, it's usually because you've outgrown what you have and can't simply N+1 it anymore. Either that, or it's tied to a brand new product offering. So you do the dance:
1) What are my competitors using?
2) Do any of my current vendors have a solution, and it is worth it?
3) Who is number 1 at the technology I'm interested in, and why?
4) Am I going to need contractors for initial implementation, or is the talent for this technology in house?
5) What's training going to be like?
Then you do a whole lot of research and select vendors(s). You let them come out and do a presentation if that's appropriate. Nine times out of ten, you'll end up going with the proven solution that a lot of people are already using. It's easy to make a business case for a known quantity.
Unfortunately, that's not how it usually works out. Other things color the decision like:
1) This friend of mine still works at this company and I'd like to throw them a bone.
2) For political reasons, we like company A.
3) The upper management prefer product C because of the pretty colors, and because so-and-so heard it was great at some cocktail party.
4) We are going to use solution D and that's official from upper management. There is no discussion. They read about it in CIO Monthly.
5) I have stock in company E.
You get the picture.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Keep up with Enterprise-level Tech? Mostly by watching Star Trek of course! Duh! :)
The Register has a news section on enterprise computing. I wouldn't say that's all you'd ever need to read, but its a start.
http://www.theregister.com/enterprise/
Consult the BOFH series of articles on how one keeps up. It's on theregister.co.uk Sure it's dated in some places but a good read. Other then that vendors are willing do bend over completely to get a sale. I recently got a Demo of Weblogic from BEA and on for Webtrends. Just for asking. If your a serious (or even not) buyer, they will give your almost everything you need.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Not always available or appropriate, but you do your research and take the plunge--but before you put all 20,000 users on the chosen solution, you try it out with 100 and then scale it up as it is proved.
The problem with this is that some products are only available to WAN type solutions, so it's either 20,000 users or none. For those, it's naturally more difficult; who do you ask about how the thing is going to work? How many other institutions use the exact product you're investigating, in an environment that's analogous to yours, who also isn't a competitor and therefore not willing to reveal their competitive advantages?
For those, I'd say: do your research as others above have suggested, but then it comes down to nailing the vendor on deliverables--what are the consequences of the product not performing as promised? Rebate, return, free upgrade to the bug-squished version? And support contracts--how much support time does the solution come with to make it work as advertised?
If anyone who wants to sell to the Enterprise isn't willing to give you both written guarantees as to performance--and consequences for failing to perform--as well as some support, they're not really ready to be an Enterprise vendor. That's part of what that $1M buys you.
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$tar -xvf
Two of the large corporations I've worked at paid a bundle to have access to the Gartner Group reports. When we were doing tech evaluations, the people who had access to the reports (you pay for search ability) would then sort of summarize things for us, or in some cases, they'd pay a fee to Gartner so that the rest of us could legally read the report, or illegally just email the rest of us a PDF and tell us not to tell anyone.
But, basically, you have to find someone who 1) has the money to do the research, 2) has the experience to make quality comparisons, and 3) is willing to do it in an unbiased manner.
Sometimes large vendors (like IBM) have things like a "Customer Care Council." These are vendor-supported forums for the customers to exchange information, but there's fees involved, or NDA's that the Corporations have to sign.
I've also come across some companies that pay for research. They get evaluation or minimally licensed copies of the software, then try to run a comparison. The information I've seen come out of these is usually heavily compromised by someone with a bias. For example, one corporation I consulted with earlier this year paid $3 million for research on what to upgrade their POP email system to. The result? I'll give you a hint: the company writing the report also sold hardware that only ran one operating system, so they naturally supplied a report putting that operating system (and what would run on it) as the choice -- and supplied price quotes for the hardware using only their hardware.
So that company paid $3 million to switch to a more expensive email solution. Doh!
This is what I do to get my enterprise running smoothly:
* Level 5 diagnostics every hour
* Level 3 diagnostics on first sign of battle ready
* Level 1 diagnostics once a year
* Inspection of warp coils for tetrion or verteron particles. These can cause poor engine performance.
If your enterprise is run on clusters, then what you keep on is mostly clustering software rather than high-end hardware, the exception being the switch fabric. So keeping up with enterprise-level tech for me means understanding things like Oracle's Cache Fusion / 10g and then knowing enough about tieing it together, which is really a network/SAN thing. For the server hardware itself, off-the-shelf stuff from IBM/Dell/HP all work fine.
http://www.gartner.com/
http://www.metagroup.com/
http://www.idc.com/
http://www.forrester.com/
http://www.idg.com/
http://www.jupiterresearch.com/
http://www.yankeegroup.com/
http://www.aberdeen.com/
http://www.amrresearch.com/
And yes, they all cost money. If you're an enterprise and you want input on how to spend you tens-of-thousands to multi-million-dollar IT budget, you can shell out a few more dollars to get some research.
In companies where the tech team drives the tech, I have seen a group of computers set aside for experimentation. They won't spend too much time on it, but from time to time, they'll try something out to see if it is promising.
If you can find a company where mangement listens to tech, it is usually pretty easy to justify this experimentation lab environment. You still have to show how having it is better than not having it, and how much it will cost over the next three years. But that's no different than any other project in techland.
Companies where the upper management drives tech decisions are generally not the best places to work. I tend to avoid them. I guess I've been lucky because of my particular micro-field (e-commerce perl programmer), while others I know always end up in top-down organizations (java programmers).
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
The point is that they'll let you take a fairly in-depth look 'under the hood' before you buy. I mean, you pay enough for these boxes/software that if they didn't they'd be shooting themselves in the foot.
As far as knowing which vendors to evaluate, we stay up to date by reading Slashdot
Dealing with Enterprise tech? Easy. When all else fails...
REVERSE THE POLARITY!
Oh, wrong Enterprise...
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!