Infrastructure’s Purpose
March 26th, 2009, by Scott Kantner
In Jan de Bont’s 1994 film Speed, Dennis Hopper plays Howard Payne, a twisted evil genius with a Nietzschean bent who puts a bomb on a bus that will explode if the vehicle goes below 50 mph. Hopper tells Keanu Reeves:
“A bomb is made to explode. That’s its meaning, its purpose. Your life is empty because you spend it trying to stop the bomb from becoming.”
Things, as well as people, are created for a purpose. That purpose is sometimes hard to determine, but it’s there. Somewhere.
We buy IT equipment for a particular purpose, but like Hopper’s bombs they don’t achieve our intentions unless they “become”, and becoming means to run and keep on running.
As in-the-trenches IT professionals, our objective is to get the gear running and keep it running. Sharing our horror stories helps all of us do that better – and helps keep us sane to boot!
//spk
[...] reason for us to consider (or fear) UCS? For most of us, UCS is not going to help with the primary purpose of our infrastructure. Here’s [...]
[...] Remember the purpose of infrastructure is to keep running – the very namesake of this blog. Our infrastructure does us no good when it’s down. Every patch brings with it the some level of risk to uptime. So, the obvious thing to do would be to test every patch before we apply it to a product system. Do you? Really? Every time? Or is easier to just apply the latest raft of fixes from say, Microsoft, and just hope for the best? For those of us who have to endure the regular water-boarding process of a SAS 70 Type II audit, hope is not a strategy. Not only do we have to test every patch before applying it to a live system, but we also have to prove that we did so, and that we have a defined process that meets the muster of the auditors. [...]