Bob Plankers

Bob Plankers is a man who wears many hats. In his professional career he has spent three decades leading teams that design, build, operate, and talk about reliable, secure, and compliant IT infrastructures, both in the public sector and in the high tech industry. He currently focuses on applied security, compliance, and operational resilience for virtualization and cloud platforms.

VMworld 2008!

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Three days until VMworld starts! Heck yeah! I’m looking forward to blogging from the conference. I am also working with TechTarget to judge the Best of VMworld 2008 awards. That should be great, there’s a lot of new stuff being announced. I’m in Tonopah, NV right now. If you look at the map the big gray spot south of us is Area 51. We traveled down the Extraterrestrial Highway (NV Highway 375) last night, but all we saw was a closed Little Ale’Inn, some deer, and a bunch of hares. No aliens. šŸ™ Today’s agenda: back to Vegas via Death Valley, and the Pioneer Saloon in Jean, NV. Photos to come shortly.

Complexity vs. Availability

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A few days ago I wrote an article on downtime. In the end it was an article on how big, complex, highly available systems get really expensive and hard to maintain. The interesting thing is that highly available systems end up having more failures because there are so many more components to them than simpler systems. Every time you add a component you increase the risk of failure. Obviously the goal of a highly available, highly redundant system is to survive outages. It’s just that the likelihood of actually having a problem is much greater. Buy a second server with mirrored disks for load balancing and now you have four disks to worry about instead of two. Ditto for power …

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Scheduled Downtime vs. Availability

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Reader Ben asked a good question in the comments of my previous post about downtime. I’m going to take a stab at this with the hopes that others will chime in and augment/correct my thinking. Isnā€™t it true that scheduled downtime is not usually factored in when calculating historic availability trends? If you had a scheduled maintenance window for 6 hours every Saturday morning, that wouldnā€™t count at all towards your downtime calculations. That could also affect the number of minutes per 9 calculation above. I am of the opinion that service availability[0] should be measured as the amount of time the service was available. If your service is down for 6 hours every week it’s not available during that …

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links for 2008-09-09

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Track Hurricane Ike / Stormpulse / Hurricane tracking, mapping This is a pretty cool web site, at least until I remember my friends in New Orleans. Frickin' hurricanes.

Sun x4540, Thumper, as FC Target?

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Hey, is anyone out there using a Sun x4540 (aka Thumper) as a fibre channel target on their SAN? The COMSTAR project that’s part of OpenSolaris appears to be able to make a volume available over the SAN. I’m very interested in that, but I’d like to know what other people think about it, especially in terms of stability & performance[0], before I go trying anything. If you have any thoughts could you leave me a comment? ————— [0] Yes, I know it’s SATA, but for what I want to do, and across 48 drives, it’ll probably be fine. Plus they come with a god-awful amount of RAM. Go caching go!

links for 2008-09-08

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Why you should avoid placing SSDs in traditional Arrays! – Anatol Studler's Blog Four Tweaks for Using Linux with Solid State Drives | Tombuntu SSD basically changes the game, and tuning has to follow. 08-26-2008 Testing Unreleased Processors – Comments – The Dell TechCenter Hmm, four sockets, 24 cores, basic division… šŸ™‚ What I want is a 2U Intel-based Dell that can take 64 GB of RAM cost-effectively, like the R805 can. Color + Design Blog / Colors Of A Cause: Park(ing) Day by COLOURlovers September 19th is Parking Day, as well as Talk Like a Pirate Day. Arrrr. Default Logins and Passwords for Networked Devices This is useful from time to time.

Downtime

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(Matt over at Standalone Sysadmin posted a thought the other day about downtime, which coincided nicely with an explanation I ended up writing for a customer about their downtime requirements. Since I had it written up anyhow I figured I’d post it here.) Downtime is often referred to as the number of 9’s in the percentage of availability. So four 9’s would be 99.99% available, which translates to 52.56 minutes of downtime a year (ignoring leap years). It breaks down like this: 98% is 10512 minutes of downtime. 99% is 5256 minutes of downtime. 99.9% is 525.6 minutes of downtime. 99.99% is 52.56 minutes of downtime. 99.999% is 5.26 minutes of downtime. By default all customers want five 9’s or …

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links for 2008-09-04

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Daring Fireball Linked List: Apple Rejects Fart-Joke iPhone App "Iā€™ve already heard from a top-tier developer this morning who, in response to this story, is dropping an idea for a very cool iPhone app out of fear that the work to create it would be for naught as Apple might reject it." Yeah, I wouldn't develop anything for the iPhone at this point. Non-existent debugging tools and lack of objective App Store publishing policies are just some of the reasons why it's a terrible platform to develop for. Preaching to the choir is a waste of time – (37signals) "I think thereā€™s an interesting point here: To create change, you need to reach out to those who donā€™t already agree …

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Doubt: A Parable

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Back in April regular readers of this blog probably noted a decrease in the posting regularity here. I didn’t say much about it, but I became the president of a theater company in Madison, WI (Strollers Theatre). Theater lighting had been a hobby of mine but with some turmoil last winter I was voted in as president, and it’s been sort of a second job for me. šŸ™‚ I’m proud to announce that the first show of our 2008-2009 season opens tomorrow at the Bartell Theatre in Madison. It’s Doubt: A Parable by John Patrick Shanley. It’s about a Catholic nun that protects a boy from the advances of a priest, and it’s about an hour and a half long. …

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