IT Infrastructure As a House of Cards

snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia takes up a topic many IT pros face: 'When you've attached enough Band-Aids to the corpus that it's more bandage than not, isn't it time to start over?' The constant need to apply temporary fixes that end up becoming permanent are fast pushing many IT infrastructures beyond repair. Much of the blame falls on the products IT has to deal with. 'As processors have become faster and RAM cheaper, the software vendors have opted to dress up new versions in eye candy and limited-use features rather than concentrate on the foundation of the application. To their credit, code that was written to run on a Pentium-II 300MHz CPU will fly on modern hardware, but that code was also written to interact with a completely different set of OS dependencies, problems, and libraries. Yes, it might function on modern hardware, but not without more than a few Band-Aids to attach it to modern operating systems,' Venezia writes. And yet breaking this 'vicious cycle of bad ideas and worse implementations' by wiping the slate clean is no easy task. Especially when the need for kludges isn't apparent until the software is in the process of being implemented. 'Generally it's too late to change course at that point.'"

Comments

I don't believe in a lot of things

[Culture20]

...but I believe in Duct Tape.
As long as your backup and tertiary machines have different kludges keeping them running, there's no problem...

Written for a P-II 300Mhz?

[damn_registrars]

Wait, you mean there have been newer and faster processors released since then? So Mordac really has been hiding something from me...

Re:All comes down to budget

[Cryacin]

Yeah, that's why the sane firms have rules on accepting gifts.

Yes, and both of them have never looked back!