CIO Article Bound to Fail

I recently found an excellent article in CIO Magazine regarding the risk of maintaining legacy systems: Bound to Fail. Many companies today are still running back office operations on systems that are 20+ years old. It is hard to replace a trusted application running on mostly depreciated hardware, with a new application that may require extensive capital outlays, has an appreciable learning curve, and is running on an unfamiliar platform. Change, especially change from "green screen" environments to GUI environments, is difficult. Based on my experience, changing systems is often much harder on the end users than it is on the IT departments.

Keeping a legacy system just because it runs well is not necessarily a good idea. As Jim Collins says in Good to Great: "Good is the enemy of Great". Not long ago, I experienced a near disaster with a "good" legacy system. One morning while heading to my office I made a shortcut through our Network Operations Center to check on things. As I passed a particular set of mission critical SCO boxes I noticed a programmer staring dumbfounded at a screen. I asked what the problem was. He told me the server died with a disk crash and wouldn't come back on-line. He'd called in support and was told that the system was no longer being serviced by the vendor, and the only person who had a clue about how to fix it had retired a few months earlier (no joke). I asked the programmer about the "hot swappable" backup server. He said that it had never been tested (still not joking). My reply: "It's about to be."

I'm the kind of person who enjoys rolling up his sleeves and working on problems. I booted the backup server and began reviewing the network activity. Seeing no network traffic on the server, I looked at the connections coming into the back of the box. It turned out that this server not "hot swappable"...it had never been hooked up. I rerouted the network cables from the dead server to the backup server, and the programmer and I began configuring it. After several tense minutes we were able to get the backup server up and running. The total outage was less than 2 hours.

Problem solved? No way. We were still running a system that was "bound to fail." I'm happy to report that by the end of the year the old system will be replaced. That incident, while not as dramatic as the one mentioned in the CIO article, taught me something about legacy systems. Just because a system is in place and running well for years, doesn't mean that it is without risks. As they age, computer systems become ticking time bombs. You never know when a drive will crash, a CPU will fail, or a power supply will die. My advice, make systems replacement part of your overall IT strategy.

Darwin Streaming Server

A few months ago I began researching Java Media Framework and streaming. This research ultimately led me away from Java Media Framework to Apple's open source streaming server Darwin. After some experimentation, I've got Darwin up and running on Windows 2000. The biggest issue I've found is that Darwin's web based administration server interferes with the streams. No big deal really, just turn off web administration. If anyone has a solution to this problem, I'd love to hear about it.

If you would like to view a sample stream click here (Quicktime Player 7 is required). You should see a short video of me and some friends playing the song "In The Jailhouse Now" at my son's school. That's me on the left playing the banjo. Jamey Ratzlaff is playing the mandolin. Next to Jamey is James Cole singing and playing the guitar. And, next to James is Steve Dodson on the bass.

My apologies to Jimmy Rodgers and the creators of the "Oh Brother Where Art Thou" soundtrack. :-)

Enjoy.

Managing IT Investments

In his April 2005 Strong Signals,column, John Parkinson writes: "Managing a portfolio of IT investments only gets harder when the benefits are unevenly distributed." I agree. It can be difficult to garner the capital required for investment in technologies that appear to have little or no short term ROI. Fortunately for me, I work in a company whose vision and strategy that includes IT investments.

John's column can be found here.

Server Virtualization: Back to the Future

Server virtualization is a hot topic these days. As IT leaders balance the need for better server utilization with the need to maintain costs, they are turning to products like VMware. In a nutshell, VMware allows for the creation of virtual servers.

Server virtualization is nothing new. 20 to 30 years ago mainframe providers like IBM were building software to allow their users to create virtual machines. The theory being that while users needed multiple systems, multiple mainframes were expensive to implement and maintain and often under utilized. VMs became a very popular alternative. You couldn't find a mainframe shop today that doesn't use VM...yes contrary to popular opinion mainframes still exist.

In the distributed world, virtual systems began to appear as people wanted to share applications across the network. Eventually terminal servers and virtual clients were created, allowing IT departments to centralize client maintenance, etc. Today we've come full circle with the whole virtual machine concept. Instead of filling our operations centers with server farms, we're turning to products like VMware to consolidate server management and increase efficiency. Sure there's the problem of what happens if we lose one of these consolidated servers running 20 or 30 virtual servers. But hey, that's what redundancy, back up, and disaster recovery are for.

My team is installing VMware. Our approach is initially to consolidate just our test servers. Using VMware we can completely mirror our production environment with a 10th of the hardware traditionally needed. How well will it work? That's yet to be determined. However according to the industry folks I talk to, companies are rapidly pursuing VMware for server virtualization.

For more information read the following ComputerWorld article: Virtualization Creates Need For More-Resilient Servers.

JDatastore: A Small Footprint Java Database

My DBA, Tim Caylor, recently started a blog about his DBA experiences called The Trenches. If you're interested in a small footprint pure Java SQL database take a look at his post on JDatastore.