It’s after 4AM, I can’t sleep since I’m in pain after a car accident and I’ve had altogether too much caffeine. I’ve already watched 3 movies. BTW, “I am Legend” - WTF! Never have I seen a decent book butchered so much! The ideas in the book were so much stronger. Seriously, go get the book and forget the movie. Sorry, Will.

Now I’m writing from The Throne Chamber once more (blessed be the Colon Drano caffeine). I’m all cramped up and can’t get up, so I thought why not post something… can’t promise it will make sense since my brain ain’t the clearest at the moment…

So - when was the last time you tested DR? Really?

If I had a penny for every time I heard the line “we back up our servers to tape but we don’t test DR, but we’re confident we’ll be up and running within 36 hours in the event of a disaster” I’d be paying Trump more money than he ever made just so he can shine my shoes, and he’d be thankful.

Let me make something clear: You need to test DR a minimum of twice a year, preferably once a quarter. Anything less and you’re just setting yourself up for failure.

Start by testing the most important machines. You probably won’t even have to artificially inject extra problems to solve (Pervy Uncle Murphy usually is right there beside you to take care of that). Marvel at how long it really takes.

If things go real peachy, did you hit your RPO and RTO? if yes, test with more machines, until you can test with the full complement of boxes your company truly needs to be up and running and making money. Document it all.

If you didn’t hit your RPO/RTO, how much did you miss them by? If it’s by a ridiculous amount, maybe the way you’re going about DR will simply not work - try replication and/or VMware…

Once you get good at it, start inventing scenarios. for instance:

- Pretend one of your tapes is bad. See how long your offsite vendor takes to bring you a fresh set once you figure out what are the barcodes you need.
- Pretend one of the critical servers can’t be recovered and you need to go back 3 weeks. How does this affect the business?
- Recover to dissimilar hardware.
- Pretend you’re dead. Are your documented procedures clear enough for your underling to follow? Are they clear enough for the janitor? The janitor’s 3-year-old kid? The kid’s parakeet? Ultimately, your DR runbooks need to be so clear that even your CEO can follow them easily, and he needs to be able to do so right out of bed, before he’s had his morning ablutions, quad-vanilla-soy-latte and his Zoloft.

Ultimately (and sorry if I’m repeating myself), you probably need to be making at least 2 tape copies, 2 copies of your backup catalog, replicating (ideally CDP) and using VMware all at the same time to have any real insurance policy against disaster.

And if you ever tell me “well, we don’t have the time to be doing DR tests” - do you really think you’ll have the time once disaster really strikes?

And, if you think that a disaster is an RGE (Resume Generating Event) then you probably are working for the wrong company and won’t get much job satisfaction there anyway.

I think I’d better get up before I lose my legs.

Nighty-night

D

As a matter of course, I deal with all kinds of IT manager types during the course of a campaign.

Sometimes said managers are well-versed in technology. Other times they have biases, are bigoted, and so on. Which is fine, I’m more opinionated, cranky and obnoxious than most.

It agitates me encountering IT management types that:

• Have no technology experience
• Have no concept of how IT relates to the business
• Have no idea how much technology costs
• Have no idea how much being penny wise and dollar foolish can hurt their business
• Cannot recognize an amazing deal due to their lack of a holistic viewpoint.

However, as annoying as the above bullets are, someone with sufficient intelligence and perserverence that cares will eventually “get it” and become able to at least have a conversation about technology. No, what bothers me more are the managers that:

1. Do not care about technology
2. Were promoted “from within” because they either knew someone or they were just the nearest body whose temperature was higher than ambient and are also guilty of #1
3. Have an IQ less than their shoe size (US units)
4. Are unable to delegate
5. Are unable to pick proper subordinates (invariably they pick people whose IQ is in the single digits)
6. Due to their unbelievable ignorance, pathologically distrust whatever vendors tell them or (the even more irksome)
7. Get blinded by inane and irrelevant marketing gimmicks (look, the box can do a million IOPS with 10 drives, yours is nowhere near as fast!)
8. They just believe whatever the last vendor told them
9. Do not value the work solid partners do for them - there are truly few people that will actually add value, instead of just wanting to take your money!

I lost a couple of deals recently because of #7 and #8. If you’re reading this, you fully well know who you are. Here’s an example - would you not be pissed if:

• You educated the customer far more than any other vendor - they freely admitted they had no idea what they’d need and indeed asked you to figure it out and suggest a way forward
• You analyzed the performance of their environment and properly engineered a solution that will, scientifically, accomodate what they have plus a pre-stated amount of future growth without just throwing product at them
• You analyzed their actual business needs and where they need to be and provided a plan to get there
• Used best practices for DR and backups
• Did it all while being less expensive than the competition, especially when considering the lack of essential features the competition suffered.

And what happens? Next thing you know, they’re picking the competitor that:

• Is unproven (not even a handful of installs where we are)
• Does not have useful functionality that they will need a few years down the line (VMware SRM anyone?)
• Did not educate them - indeed ,recommended plainly wrong “best practices” that could bring an iSCSI environment to its knees (interesting what you hear when a storage vendor has no idea about Ethernet, switching, port channeling etc)
• Blinded them with things like “look we have more cache” or “our box takes more drives!” (they’ll never need them)
• Did not do thorough (or any) performance analysis (”looking” at random perfmon data doesn’t guarantee success)
• Cannot even do replication
• Did not offer them snapshots or any application awareness for backups and DR

I guess I was outsold. As someone I greatly respect and like but am frequently infuriated by likes to say, “tell them what they want to hear”. Maybe I need to become more corrupt.

So what would an ideal IT higher-up look like? I know I could do the job while being drowned and quartered, let alone in my sleep. But I’d get bored. A few pointers on who you should hire:

1. Someone with real IT experience - ideally someone that started on the operational side and migrated to management
2. Someone that not just understands but actually likes and appreciates technology (too hard to keep up otherwise)
3. Someone that understands the financial and business ramifications of action or inaction when it comes to IT purchases
4. Someone that understands the value of partnerships! Indeed, someone that already has solid partnerships.
5. Even if you have semi-competent people within, sometimes it’s better to just hire someone with real experience and not wait till the internal hire figures it out, especially if you have projects on the line
6. Get someone that understands RPO, RTO and what those mean in financial terms
7. Find someone that used to work in a large corporation but “just had enough” - their experience is invaluable but they’re looking to go to a smaller outfit
8. They should be able to sell better than most salespeople that visit them!

I could go on but you get the idea.

D

Been a while since I posted anything - there’s a TON of material but some of us actually do more than blog, it’s quarter/year end, and I barely have time to go to the bathroom…

But this was an easy one so I thought I’d post it real quick. Using Scribefire, a blogging plug-in for Firefox. I hate it.

Disclaimer: The machines used are not identical.

However, the CPUs supposedly are pretty close in speed (2.6 vs 2.8 GHz). Memory is the same.

Graphics are also similar but the Lenovo box has 128MB VRAM whereas the Mac has 512MB and is a faster GPU.

The contenders: Macbook Pro 2.8GHz vs Lenovo T62p (14″ model) running Vista 64, 2.6GHz.

The Mac is running a 32-bit OS (64-bitness is coming with Snow Leopard next year). It also has switchable graphics and one can choose between the on-chipset Nvidia 9400 or the discrete 9600. Typically on-board graphics are pretty crappy.

Despite the dissimilarity of the machines here are some notables:

• Cinebench really takes off in 64-bit mode in Vista
• OS X seems to do quite well even though it’s not 64-bit yet
• The integrated graphics on the new Mac are awesome
• The discrete graphics are great for a laptop
• OS X seems to be more efficient than Vista when doing multi-CPU work, at least in this case
• If someone is looking for a decent modern laptop they can do far worse than the new Macs, even a plain Macbook would be pretty decent

Here’s a chart of the results: