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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.'"
As a dev, what's the problem with a 24 port gigabit switch as the "core" on a medium sized office? Aside from the fact that 10Gb is becoming popular (has become popular?) in the datacenter? Most desktops are only at the 1Gb level (and most users at below 100Mb), and most inbound internet pipes are much smaller. I don't understand the downfall here.
Can you elaborate?
2^3 * 31 * 647
Kernighan & Plauger
The Elements of Programming Style
2nd edition, 1974 (exemplified in FORTRAN and PL/1!)
In the defense of IT, those people they're trying to advise aren't always the best at taking advice. (But then again, neither are IT admins always the best at giving it.)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
As a dev, what's the problem with a 24 port gigabit switch as the "core" on a medium sized office?
If all you've got is 24 hosts (well, 23 and an uplink), then it's fine. I suspect that the reality he's alluding to is something more along the lines of multiple switches chained together off of the "core" switch. The problem is that lower-end switches don't have the fabric (interconnects between ports) to handle all those frames without introducing latency at best and dropped packets at worst. For giggles, try hooking up a $50 8-port "gigabit" switch to 8 gigabit NICs and try to run them all full tilt. Antics will ensue... The cheap switches have a shared fabric which doesn't have the bandwidth to handle traffic between all the ports simultaneously. True core switches are expensive because they have dedicated connections between all the ports (logically, if not physically... I'm no switch designer), so there's no fabric contention.
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
Isn't this taught to death in ITIL 101 that every MBA must go through in order to get their certificate in an accredited college? It sort of is sad that the concepts taught in this never hit the real world in a lot of organizations. Not all. I've seen some companies actually be proactive, but it is easy for firms to fall into the "we'll cross that bridge when we come to it" trap.
From the original message we read that the "code was also written to interact with a completely different set of OS dependencies, problems, and libraries." This seems to imply that the IT organizations are allowing outside interests to dictate the rules of the game. If there were a stable set of operating system calls and libraries to rely on, then the software vendors would have an easier time maintaining software. I recognize that Linux changes, but the operating system calls work well and API is quite stable. I have used UNIX for a long time and I have compiled programs from 25 years ago under Linux. There have been some additions since then, but the basics of Linux work like the basics of UNIX from 25 years ago.
At present there are some applications available only on Windows and some only on Windows/Mac OSX. This might be difficult to change, but going along with someone's plan for computing which is based on continued obsolescence seems inappropriate. At least those who are more or less forced by software availability to use Windows should investigate Linux and negotiate with their vendors to supply Linux solutions.
Computers are hard to manage and hard to program. It is not helpful to undergo regular major overhauls in operating systems.
Ray Seyfarth, ray.seyfarth@gmail.com, http://rayseyfarth.blogspot.com
I don't think budget is a problem at all here. The problem as described by the article is with vendor-provided software being crufty and having all kinds of problems. The author even mentions that normal free-market mechanisms don't seem to work, because there's little or no competition: these are applications used by specific industries in very narrow applications, and frequently have no competition. In a case like this, it doesn't matter what your budget is; the business requirement is that you must use application X, and that's it. So IT has a mandate to support this app, but doing so is a problem because the app was apparently written for DOS or Windows 95 and has had very little updating since then.
The author's proposed solution is for Microsoft to jettison all the backwards-compatibility crap. We Linux fans have been saying this for years, but everyone says we're unrealistic and that backwards compatibility is necessary for apps like this. Well, it looks like it's starting to bite people (IT departments in particular) in the ass.