The Backup

The Switch

Last week the remote satellite of the Data Warehouse in Japan crashed as I wrote about in the previous post.. It stubbornly refused to start up again. It was dead, it was no more, it had expired and gone to meet his maker, end of story.

What do you do when a server crash?  When it is beyond any hope for a quick resurrection. Either you buy a new server and do a bare-metal-restore which is almost always an agonising business.If you never done a bare metal restore, believe me you do not want to do that. Or you switch to the failover backup if you have one. 

The satellite in Japan was a partial replica of the central Data Warehouse, identified by it's DNS address, all reports, processes etc. picked up the data from the Data Warehouse via the DNS address, so it was just a matter of changing the DNS address and the Data Warehouse was back in business again, everything worked flawlessly a seamless transition.

The Concept

Today failover is common but very expensive. The Data Warehouse failover solution costed about 1000$. Take any of the big guys Business Intelligence solutions, you will spend way more than 10 times that amount and you will probably not get a thenth of the performance improvements of a DW satellite. The very reason for a DW satellite is performance, LAN response times even for a faraway workshop and more secure connections, if there are WAN disruptions the local Satellite BI data is still there. The BI satellite concept is nothing less than brilliant.

The Question

When you evaluate BI solutions you should ask ‘How do I set up a satellite and what does it cost?’ And then you can compare with the original from yours truly.

The Japanese Satellite

The Data Warehouse Japanese satellite (2012 - 2016-04-18)

The DW satellite a tiny  Dell Optiplex 790.

We installed the satellite as temporary cache 2012 to overcome the slow communication line between the HQ and the Osaka plant.

The satellite was in continuous operation and did more than you can expect. It passed away last weekend, and refused to come up again. The satellite is now walking greener pastures no longer confined to a dark server room.

RIP

 

The Speech

This week I attended a software event, a one day inspiration event promoting the software.

One of the talks was yet another of those irritating pretended humble “I know nothing about…” talks. You probably heard a number of them. The presenter is always extremely good at deliver the speech, more of an actor than an IT guy.

The introduction

And IT guy they are not, oh no “I was given the task to lead this project despite the fact I know nothing about IT”. It is very important to emphasize they have been given the task directly by the CEO. “I who know nothing was given the task”, the CEO have taken the presenter aside and told him “I believe in you, you are the only one who can implement the new software in our company”.

The swap

After this introduction comes the swap. it is mandatory for this type of inspiring talk.It is a retorical figure that goes like this:

“I who know nothing of IT, was given the trust from the CEO, to implement X software and lead the project” and now comes the swap, This is not about IT, it is about PEOPLE. Actually it can be anything but IT. BUSINESS or ORGANIZATION are very common to use in the swap, but this time it was PEOPLE.

The praise

Now when the swap is done, there is a humble description of the project done under the presenters leadership always reported directly to the CEO. And now the praise of all the fantastic project members, the fantastic company and all it’s fantastic employees and the best CEO in the world. And lastly but not least all the fantastic IT consultants who made it possible for the presenter to carry the CHANGE through with the help of the super duper SOFTWARE. The praise cannot be overdone, most of all the project members are ascended up to the heaven some of them named despite the audience have no clue on who they are. All and everyone is praised except the naysayers.    

The naysayers

The naysayers are all those who have opinions about the project. The naysayers are not praised. The presenter tells us the naysayers spread negative energy, they are no team players, petty minded incapable to grasp the TRANSFORMATION and to rigid to follow the CHANGE, cemented in the past.The naysayers must be removed, no mercy on them. The naysayers are not 100% loyal to the project leader so they risk the project and must be removed. Once the naysayers are removed comes the finale.

The finale

The finale starts with a summary of the project and a low keyed recap of the praise. Then the result which is always above expectations and a long story on how hard the transformation was and doubts if the project would ever succeed. But lo and behold in the end the project was a great success. And yes it was worth all the hard work.

My comment

It’s not that dislike these speeches, I just heard them and seen them be performed one time too many.

And I have figured in such speeches as named project member, IT consultant and naysayer (once).

Thank you Amazon

for the appreciation of my language skills.

Based on my recent visit Amazon recommends me to buy Complicated Stuff in Simple English.

 “I know words, I have the best words. I have the best, but there is no better word than stupid.”

Lasse Trump