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

Re:As a non-developer, this is what I see

[drachenstern]

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?

Don’t patch bad code - rewrite it

[D4C5CE]

Don’t patch bad code – rewrite it.

Kernighan & Plauger
The Elements of Programming Style
2nd edition, 1974 (exemplified in FORTRAN and PL/1!)

Re:Take responsibility and stop the magical thinki

[FooAtWFU]

"they simply fail to properly advise the units that are making decisions of the cost and consequence of such a short-sighted approach."

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.)

Re:As a non-developer, this is what I see

[JerkBoB]

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.