A Successful Failure
Houston we have a problem! It is an iconic line that reminds countless space buffs and movie fans about the great difficulty, potential disaster, and the perilous state of the Apollo 13 space mission — a mission NASA now calls “A Successful Failure.” Ignoring your own application availability alerts may not go down in history as a defining moment, but can also wreak similar havoc
Now back to 1970:
“A routine stir of an oxygen tank ignited damaged wire insulation inside it, causing an explosion that vented the contents of both of the Service Module’s (SM) oxygen tanks to space. Without oxygen, needed for breathing and for generating electric power, the SM’s propulsion and life support systems could not operate. The Command Module’s (CM) systems had to be shut down to conserve its remaining resources for reentry, forcing the crew to transfer to the Lunar Module (LM) as a lifeboat. …
Allow me to jog your memory . . .
Maybe today you haven’t had a failure in a dozen or more months and suddenly the slam dunk renewal for your high availability software licenses is under the redline of the CFO’s pen. Or perhaps, due in part to the overuse of the term, clever marketing, or the redefinition of high availability your CIO, once the most die-hard availability fan, has begun to waver on its value. …
Understand the cloud market
A number of analyst firms are predicting an ever-increasing number of deployments of applications, databases, and solutions in the cloud. According to Gartner, firms are “moving to the cloud at an increasing rate.”[1] In fact, Gartner and other analysts expect the pace of cloud migration and deployment will continue to accelerate, driven in large part by the pace of innovation in the cloud. …
Tips from the movies — Multiplicity
Multiplicity is a 1996 American science fiction comedy film starring Michael Keaton as Doug Kinney, a busy construction worker struggling to make time for his family and his demanding job. When a scientist offers to clone him, Doug agrees to just make meeting his schedule and commitments easier. But then the copies of him begin making copies of themselves. By the time the last copy is made the point is clear, cloning may not be all it’s cracked up to be, or at the very least comes with some strong warnings, challenges and side effects. …
5 signs that it will take more than a blog post to fix your high availability
The signs are there. The warning lights are flashing. In your gut, you can sense it. Maybe you can’t sleep. Your problems with high availability are deep. But, maybe you are not quite sure.
1. If you think your cloud SLA is all you need for high availability
Cloud solutions have provided great advancements in increased hardware availability and resilience. However, application high availability requires more than just selecting the right hypervisor or cloud provider. Your strategy for high availability cannot stop with the SLA provided by the cloud or a virtualization provider. As quoted by Wired, “The almost four-day Amazon outage of April 2011 did not breach Amazon’s EC2 SLA, which as a FAQ explains, “guarantees 99.95% availability of the service within a Region over a trailing 365 period.” In this DZone article, our own David Bermingham breaks down the differences between cloud SLAs and application availability in detail. …
Planning is Key to Enterprise Availability (and to a Happy Marriage)
Planning dates and getaways, fabulously romantic dinners are a great part of loving your spouse well. Seminars and workshops overflowing with tips for improving your relationship abound in nearly every area of the world.
But, listen in on the training session provided by SIOS Technology Corp. Project Manager for Professional Services, Edmond Melkomian, and you’ll quickly learn that planning dinners and anniversary retreats aren’t the only way to love your spouse well.
In a recent class on SIOS Protection Suite for Linux, Edmond shared three tips that help you love your spouse well in an enterprise world: plan, plan, plan.
1. “Plan to plan” your enterprise availability solution
In his course, Edmond Melkomian asked students to name the first thing you should do when deploying an enterprise solution. His answer, “Plan, plan, plan.” It seems obvious, but the first step is to start making the plan. A fairly decent start for a plan includes developing the details for each of the project phases, such as milestones, checkpoints, risks, risk mitigation and strategies, stakeholders, timelines, stakeholder communication plans. …
Joseph Lalonde of jmlalonde.com has a blog highlighting the leadership lessons from popular movies such as Hancock, The Greatest Showman, and Frozen II. In credit to Joseph’s inspiring leadership lessons, here are four high availability lessons on cloud migration from Disney’s Frozen II.
Disney’s Frozen II and Cloud Migration Lessons
In Disney’s animated adventure Frozen II the characters Anna, Elsa, Kristoff, Olaf and Sven leave Arendelle to travel to an ancient, autumn-bound forest of an enchanted land. In the adventure, they set out to find the origin of Elsa’s powers in order to save their kingdom. …
Enterprise Availability: Lessons from the Court
I love basketball. I love to play it, watch it, and think through the cerebral aspects of the game; the thoughts and motivations, strategy and tactics. I like to look for the little things that work or fail, the screen set too soon or the roll that happened too late. I like defense and rotation. I like to know the coaches’ strategy for practice, walk-throughs, travel, and so on. …
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