Posts by Erik4872

The Internet of Things will save us all!

I wonder what's going to happen when everyone's furnace, toaster, refrigerator and lights are connected to the Internet.

Stuff like this is crazy. I don't work in automation, but i do work in an environment that requires a network with no Internet access for some key functions. Part of the reason for this is that, like the SCADA gear everyone's talking about, we deal with wacky proprietary crap that absolutely fails to work when you start turning even basic Windows security on. The crap vendors won't (or can't in some cases) fix the problem - most of them are either the only supplier or one of two in the world. The problem is that all the stuff you can't secure *needs* to be air gapped. It's a major pain to deal with and requires nasty workarounds like sneakernetting files around, but it has to be done. This goes doubly so for us because some of these devices are actual end user machines with people sitting in front of them.

Everyone forgets that these Internet-connected devices, even though they communicate through standard protocols, have that server software implementing the protocols sitting somewhere. In the case of IoT things, that could be a cheap system-on-chip, or a Windows 2000 Server SP3 embedded computer with no upgrade capability.

The 365 shoe drops...

I knew it was coming, but wasn't sure where they were going to start. The fact that you can only get the updates if you're a 365 customer is a pretty good indication of your status if you buy a one-off perpetual licensed copy. Second class citizen, indeed.

How much do you want to bet Microsoft is releasing the ability to change the blinding white-on-white color scheme in Office 2013, but only for subscribers? (Unfortunately, I'd pay for that - I spend at least a couple hours a day in Word and Excel and even in "gray" mode I'm getting headaches!

This should be interesting

The company I work for does work with Lufthansa. We're far from a bottom-of-the-barrel, lowest-bidder IT outsourcer like IBM, and we _still_ have major issues dealing with them. It's a personality thing more than anything else.

I cannot imagine the hilarity that will ensue the first time the LH folks are told that they now need to call IBM's Global Center of Excellence Support Desk and talk to "Steve" for even the simplest IT change. Or maybe it's a good thing -- ITIL and the like might appeal to the rigid engineering culture. It all depends on how many more layers of crap they now have to wade through to do something, just like any IT outsourcing deal.

It's all cyclical

Businesses, especially those whose primary focus is not technology, are not concerned about IT and information security, full stop. All of the credit card related breaches are covered by insurance, so businesses see no need to protect payment systems. Maybe the Sony Pictures hack will ring a few bells, now that some of the corporate dirty laundry is starting to be circulated. It's a whole different thing when emails about your political opinions, what you think about your employees/customers, or other secrets come out as opposed to something your insurance company just writes a check for.

All the breathless Gartner people talking about BYOD being the future are blissfully unaware of the fact that doing it correctly basically means a complete network transplant. It used to be that you trusted most things sitting behind the firewall. Once you start letting phones, tablets, etc. into the system, everything becomes untrusted no matter where it's connecting from. Most companies aren't willing to pay the money required to do this correctly. I would say most IT organizations are jumping around making executive iDevices work come hell or high water now. Anyone who doesn't is going to be called obstructionists like this article seems to state, and will be outsourced to India.

Yay Bubble 2.0

How is this any different from pets.com? I can't believe we haven't learned anything from the dotcom bubble.

I've experienced a Terry Childs like incident

I'm not surprised that systems people are looked on with suspicion. I've seen a pretty even split between normal people doing their best to maintain order and be nice, and BOFH-level personality issues. Look at how many people came out to defend Terry Childs' actions. The facts of the case are that he basically used his power and a lack of oversight to insert himself as the single point of failure in the network, keeping all the config files stored in memory, with the only backups being in his possession. There's no way to defend that.

At a previous very large employer that grew from a startup, we had Network Guy. NG had built the entire infrastructure from the ground up, and had been allowed to run it unchallenged for years.The only problem is that nothing was documented, and the only people he allowed access to the equipment were 2 employees who followed his orders. He also had a personality that could be best described as "acerbic" and was highly possessive of "his" network...typical ThinkGeek T-shirt guy. When Startup became Big Company over a 5 year period, the CIO rightfully started worrying about what would happen if NG quit, was fired, or was incapacitated. When the CIO brought someone in to work with him and document everything, NG's response was simply, "No, I will not be doing that." It took firing him, getting the minions back under control, hiring a couple of consultants and very carefully probing every corner of the network to get things back under control. So yes, control freaks who get system admin jobs can really be a problem. Being a *good* control freak is a great thing, but being the SPOF is not.

Top of the app bubble?

I seem to recall more than a few news stories from 1999-2000 involving insane tech startup CEO behavior that have a similar smell to this one. Every corporate executive has to have some serious balls and be willing to do crazy things, but it's that special combination of inexperience and hubris that surfaces these interesting news stories. Even Zuckerberg manages to keep a reasonably low profile and have his handlers take care of things.

Most entertaining of the bunch is the one about the "CEO in the plastic pants" from theglobe.com. http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB988750097459636

I imagine we'll be seeing a few more of these before the final pop.

"Hacking"?

Whenever I read something about a celebrity's Twitter account being "hacked", I have to wonder what actually happened. Twitter is just a password-protected web service, so are the people targeting a particular person and installing keyloggers, or are the super-secret passwords for these accounts not so super-secret?

I wouldn't be surprised if some of the largest corporate Twitter accounts have a password similar to "123Passw0rd" to make it easier for the marketing interns to update the feed.

Retail sucks but I see their point

My wife and I both have iPhones and she's got a MacBook Pro. (I'm the old fart lugging around the ThinkPad...) Whenever we've gone to Apple for help we haven't had any issues, but I think that's because we're nice reasonable people. In our experience, if you buy the warranty or have a legitimate problem during the manufacturer's warranty, they'll try to make things right. That's part of the price -- even my old fart ThinkPad with the accidental damage protection means that I can get a Lenovo guy to show up next day to fix something...and the laptop is about twice the price of Lenovo's crappy consumer machines.

That said, I can corroborate some of the stories in that thread. I've heard lots and lots of iTantrums whenever I've brought our things in to be looked at. It's usually business types whining about how important their work is and how they need a new device *right now* or the typical know-nothing consumer who feels they have the right to yell for buying an expensive phone. Telling someone under 30 that they'll be without social media in their pockets for a few days is like a prison sentence apparently.

Apple's in an interesting spot with their stores -- they don't just sell computers, they sell the Portal to Your Life for many people. Losing a phone or the data on it is pretty traumatic and Apple does their best to hide complexity from users that might allow them to recover things on their own.

Hello again, 1999

I'm surprised daily reading the tech press and seeing story after story about revenue-free companies generating huge valuations and IPOs of companies that have no long term business plan. I feel like I went back in time 15 years and that we've learned nothing. I know interest rates are low, and there was bound to be a stock bubble after the real estate mess, but technology AGAIN? Pick something else next time, like tulips!

It's the dotcom bubble all over again, but with phones and social media this time. It's interesting because the Apple/Android smartphone ecosystem allows for lots of cool useful things to be built. It also allows for dotcom era startups to pop up out of the woodwork again and easily build user data-collecting apps that don't actually have much technical merit. And this time it's beyond easy -- the phone platforms practically give you every functionality you would have to build yourself through APIs.

Let's look at some of the parallels...

- Outsized startup founder/CEO personalities and puff piece journalism about them?....Check.

- Companies with no revenue model beyond ads?....Check.

- Buzzwords then: Eyeballs, Sticky, Web. Buzzwords now: Big Data, Mobile, Social, Cloud.

- Huge infrastructure spend....Physical then, virtual/cloud now. (Too bad, no dotcom bankruptcy sales this time....)

- Sky high real estate?...Check, in NYC and SF, just like last time.

- Insane employment market? Not as bad as then, but anyone who can say "Hadoop" has a job now.

It's funny, I've been over in my little corner of tech (systems/infrastructure) through both bubbles, and watched people get filthy rich, all while mostly ignoring it. Maybe if there's a third one I'll ditch the actual knowledge and go work for a cloud-based social frictionless mobile infotainment monetizer as a Big Data Specialist or something.

All I know is this -- all the coders cranking out phone apps now are going to be just like all the HTML developers back in 1999 when the music stopped. Hopefully this tech recession won't be as bad...

The tower approach is just as bad as single-supplier

Anyone who has worked for an outsourcer who has to work in their "tower" with other vendors in the other "towers" knows how bad things can get. ITIL and stuff is supposed to take care of this, but it just results in more paperwork and you're still talking third-hand to the customer.

The whole outsourcing concept just doesn't make sense. There is no way any business, public or private, could run an IT department cheaper by paying a company to do it who also has to make money. In the US, there is a lot of government IT outsourcing as well, but I imagine a lot of that is driven by people complaining about taxes, "lazy entitled government employees" and the fact that civil service is pretty much the only place you can get a guaranteed pension anymore. I would think that the UK and Europe in general would have a lot fewer "deficit hawks" constantly calling for the dismantling of all government departments.

eBay = Home lab bonanza

The only way I would even think of doing production junk box networking would be if so much redundancy were designed in that it wouldn't matter if you had warranty support or not. VM host blows up, oh well, at least the VM is safe and running on another host...

Company labs and home labs are a totally different story. Even without the dotcom bankruptcy sales (which were awesome back in the day) there is so much equipment being refurb'd or sold off-lease that's like new. I have a Cisco 3750G switch and a very well-licensed ASA5510 that I paid a few hundred apiece for -- easily would have been $5k even with discounts. One of the big things that I'm predicting will be up for sale more often soon is IBM System x boxes -- as customers decide they want to upgrade early to avoid the slow IBM death spiral re: support.

Anyone who's done IT work in large corporations knows that every project has "spare" hardware that somehow makes its way onto the eBay market, new-in-box, never powered on or installed. I've bought a lot of dubious-origin servers for the home lab that way. And since lots of companies lease their equipment, it winds up on eBay anyway with resellers trying to shift it.

Cloud first indeed

Microsoft is making all the moves to desensitize businesses to their worries about the cloud. Azure AD is going to be a big thing once Windows 10 comes out...not quite a Windows Live consumer account, not quite an on-premises Active Directory, but cheaper than running your own DCs for small business. It's vendor lock-in all over again -- no business is going to switch away from Microsoft's AAAaaS once they make the move even if the price goes through the roof. Same thing goes for the rest of Office 365 -- changing out the way users save files once they get used to storing them in the cloud will be just too hard. They basically want to rebuild their Windows/Office monopoly in the cloud.

It's an interesting strategy - solve difficult problems that are very hard to change the processes of later (authentication, file storage, systems management, etc.) and even if it's not ideal, companies will permanently be paying the subscriptions because it's too hard to change and/or too cheap (in their minds) to do on-premises. Problem is, those subscriptions add up over time. How many people have heard someone at a car dealer say "how much can I get for $X per month?" not realizing that they're going to get tricked into a non-optimal lease or be paying a car loan for 7 years...

Hmmm...this won't end well, I've been through it before.

A previous poster mentioned that most airlines already outsource, and that's true. The problem is that, on paper, the costs are lower. The reality is that the vendor will proceed to nickel-and-dime the airline on a time and materials basis for everything that isn't literally written into the contract. The service quality drops because the vendor replaces the knowledgeable in-house talent with the cheapest they can find. I worked for an airline in the US that outsourced its data center and network to a large provider, and was retained on the in-house IT team. Everything routine that we used to do became an absolute nightmare because of finger pointing and process/paperwork. We got to the point where we were figuring out how _not_ to trigger changes in the environment to avoid the massive headaches and late night conference calls. And since this is IBM...they have a lock on the patent for how to provide the least amount of service for the most amount of money.

I seriously wonder if someday, far in the future, MBA school case studies will look back on this era (80s to now basically) as the outsourcing era and teach it as a "how not to do things" case. It really doesn't make any sense -- how could anyone possibly do a task cheaper than your in-house, "free with purchase" resources?

Oh boy, MCCEs

Microsoft Certified Cloud Engineers, looks like the late 90s have come back around. :-)

Last time people, Cloud is...

- VMs running on your machines or someone else's

- Easily changeable networking

- Flexible storage

- Flexible provisioning model

- In some cases, magic SaaS that you're told to ignore the inner workings of

Any systems guy who understands all of the underlying technology and can work with whatever automation framework ties it all together is a Cloud Engineer. The main difference with the Cloud in terms of AWS/Azure/whatever public or private cloud is that developers get the chance to run wild on someone else's hardware and without properly sizing/scaling their application. And in the public cloud, developers often don't see the results of a bad architectural decision or a runaway application because of the scale of the back end.

The thing is, the public cloud is pretty cool taken with the right grain of salt. For the most part, Amazon and Microsoft have made sane architectural choices, and provide devs the opportunity to properly build in failover, etc. into the system. The problem is when developers who may or may not get the entire "big system picture" are able to throw up huge production applications with big flaws in their design in the name of agile development. That's when you hear of a startup's web applications falling over because someone decided not to invest in the additional availability zone, etc.

I think the big thing that's coming up next is that systems integration, aka the "make shit work" department will be seen as more important than it is now. Devs are great, sysadmins are great, but the real test is when you slap 17 things that weren't designed to go together into the same space and start grinding out the dependencies. (This is what I do, and it's something that there's no certification for...you need a very good teacher and OJT in the form of a stream of crazy problems to solve.)

Interesting

One of the toughest things to do to get a Windows application stack working is to work out and deploy all the prerequisites. I think that as long as an organization can keep its developers under control the idea of containerized applications is a good one.

Unfortunately, my job is in systems integration, so I get to see exactly what happens when developers aren't controlled, when salespeople sell things that don't exist, etc. DevOps is a good model when your Devs also have some Ops skills. When they don't, it's a mess. In my experience, developers have very little insight about how the infrastructure works once they get their application to "run". Admittedly, we're in an era of infinitely elastic cloud computing (ha ha...) so who cares if the devs build something that requires 6 cores of CPU running flat out for minutes at a time?

Surprised this still happens

One thing software companies should realize by now is that anything they release is going to have the debugger run over it, have its network data transmission scrutinized, etc. by someone, and the results will be blogged about. I'm assuming this is just some developer testing feature that got left on...software companies wouldn't send this kind of data in cleartext.

One would think that if a software company wanted to collect analytics in a way that violated the terms and conditions, it would at least be encrypted and set to be dribbled out at random intervals or embedded in the DRM requests to make detection more difficult.

Huge bets are OK for the right reasons

HP has increasingly made bigger and bigger bets on huge shifts in their strategy, the latest of which is the shunting off of their PC and printer business. I personally don't believe all the Gartner hype about PCs disappearing completely, but HP sure seems to. I know the role of PCs will be severely diminished, but there's still money to be made producing a solid product that doesn't fall apart. I posted previously in another HP article that they really need to just dump the whole consumer garbage dump overboard and focus on higher-end higher-margin machines. No one wants the garbage HP Pavilion line of laptops or the $49 disposable printers.

I guess the big thing that bothers me most is that all these shifts are being driven by the stock market and people clamoring for constant growth. But why couldn't she just hive off each division, let them do their own thing, and roll up all their profits to the top level?

Is this actually warranted?

I work for a large multinational organization (nowhere near IBM-sized.) Like IBM, we do have a huge "operations" team that, by our estimates in Engineering, is extremely bloated and overstaffed. Our team does pretty good work but never gets extra headcount or budget. Our operations team gets whatever they ask for in terms of people and budget simply because they play the right political connections. And their work product is absolutely horrendous. I just got off another extremely frustrating conference call with some of these folks -- it's amazing how much effort they go through to avoid doing work.

So here's a question. I know this is most likely IBM trying to quietly fire US workers by making them angry enough to quit. However, having seen something similar to what the memo is describing, I wonder if it's even partially warranted. IBM has been doing some pretty nasty underhanded things to its "expensive" onshore resources lately. But I do see how easy it is for someone to carve themselves out a quiet little niche in a big organization and stay firmly planted there for 20+ years. Maybe they're actually going through and cleaning up that part of the dead wood. That said, it looks like they're trying to "retrain" people to be social media and cloud consultants. I'm not sure that's a good strategy if these people are the scary smart folks who quietly keep zOS or DB2 puttering along.

Does any IBMer have any insight on this? Are these just people who haven't gotten "outstanding performance" or whatever on their reviews and they wound up on some HR list? Or is there an actual reason beyond rehiring US workers in India?

Scary

I wouldn't want to be the storage admin who, even after triple checking the backups and praying to the array gods, lost data after this upgrade. If I were EMC, and had absolutely no way to make that update non-disruptive, I'd be sending teams of people and tons of free loaner units out. Not really knowing what's involved here, this kind of update must be so drastic that there would be no way to read data from the "old firmware format" disks. How could that be possible? No matter what form you store the data in on the physical disk, it still has to be in a logical format that can be interpreted. How hard would it be to write firmware that can read the old disks and do the conversion when the array reboots?

I don't know, maybe EMC should just give away disks and have the customers migrate the data to a new array and give them back the old one when they're done.

Retail bankruptcies are never fun

I remember when Circuit City went belly up last decade. Admittedly, their strategy of "Let's fire our experienced salespeople because they're too expensive" was one of a string of failures on their part, but they left behind a big footprint. There are still old Circuit City stores in my neck of the woods that haven't been rented by anyone else, leaving a blighted empty big box store that really can't be used for anything other than another big box. All the brick and mortar chains are going to be releasing lots of real estate onto the market when Amazon finally brings the hammer down. Home Depot is built right across the street from Lowe's. 4 supermarket chains all coexist basically right next to each other in some spots. I've seen street corners with a Walgreens, CVS and Rite Aid all on the same intersection. Best Buy is right next to....oh wait, there's no other large electronics retailers anymore and they're still on the verge of going under. I remember reading that the reason Sears is still in OK shape is because they either own or have ultra-long term leases on their stores, which is apparently a rare thing nowadays.

Radio Shack is just in a bad spot. Fewer people are learning about amateur radio, analogue electronics outside of audio is just not the thing to tinker with anymore, and it's not really possible to do board-level repair on gadgets. I do remember growing up in the 80s, and seeing them selling lots of stereo equipment, electronic gizmos like clocks, CB radios and radar detectors, and of course the Trash 80 and Tandy PC clones. Since anyone can buy a cell phone cheaper from Amazon or a carrier's store, there's really not much left for them to sell to people. I go there very occasionally when I need a cable or something that I can't wait for, and they're always very expensive with a limited selection.

The funny thing is that I do remember when they were at least a reliable choice when you wanted something electronic, and they even had their own factories making components back before that got offshored. That's kind of the only reason they're not bankrupt yet...those early years let them build up huge reserves. Kind of like Dell, or to a lesser extent, IBM...still plugging along but a shadow of their size and influence during their "golden age."

Can't we just pop the bubble now and get it over with??

The flashbacks to the dotcom bubble have been getting stronger lately, and I thought they had peaked with the WhatsApp purchase by Facebook. But this just sounds like some investment banker whispered in Microsoft's ear that they need a cloud-enabled gamification platform combined with a social media property with synergies in the pre-Millenial market demographic to monetize revenue streams via integrated immersive infotainment apps. Oh, and Big Data.

I'm not saying it would be great to wipe out all this stock market value, after all, my retirement's in there too...but it might shock people back into focusing on fundamentals like actually producing a product or software that isn't driven by fads in mobile, social media, an app ecosystem, or The Cloud. I do think that deals like this, the WhatsApp deal,. the Instagram deal, Snapchat turning down a $3B buyout by Google, and the Twitter craziness are going to be remembered as the end of Bubble 2.0.

Expect more of this soon

Microsoft's commitment to rapid product releases and bundling security patches with behavior changes is going to assure that we have these problems more frequently. In The Real World, it's not uncommon for an "enterprisey" business system to be deployed that takes advantages of certain "features" in an OS, browser, etc. Said system is usually one-off, costs tons of money to replace or fix, and can't easily be extracted from day to day business operations. Yes, running something like IE 6 or unpatched JRE 1.4 is awful, but sometimes it's necessary. The consultants who build said systems are already long gone and often demand huge sums when they are called back to update these kinds of applications.

I'm hoping that if Microsoft stops releasing discrete "versions" of their products, as they're rumored to be considering, they'll at least do a Long Term Stable branch like some of the Linux distributions do. That LTS branch can have the old patch framework -- patches are patches and feature updates are optional.

We're currently dealing with this fun combined feature/patch...identifying and fixing this on a universal basis for everyone in our organization is going to be fun.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/08/06/internet-explorer-begins-blocking-out-of-date-activex-controls.aspx

Hardware is here to stay

The problem for HP and others is what kind of hardware will run all this software-defined stuff. If you believe all the Gartner pundits, who are breathlessly pointing at all the social media startups who have eschewed traditional hardware, then HP and the like are toast. However, like everything, I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. Large cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and so on won't be buying HP hardware -- they have their own reference designs they ship off to Joe's Server Shack, and they order 50,000 of them at a time. They also have the people to maintain said hardware in the absence of a warranty. Huge Internet properties will also follow a similar course -- Google and Facebook are always held up as examples of this.

The things I do see becoming less relevant are extremely expensive managed storage (EMC, NetApp) and possibly networking (Cisco.) But even with that, vendors are trying to lock people into software-defined networking and compute on their blade chassis. Expensive storage will live on, but it won't be the only choice like it was in datacenters...only workloads that need that kind of uptime or performance will get it. Others can deal with software-defined storage controlling disks on a less expensive platform.

For the average business with on-site infrastructure, HP et al still have plenty of people to sell to. Some margins will take a hit, but the business will be there.

Super Cruise

This is (or could be) pretty cool, but doesn't the name sound something like one of the hyperbole-laced feature names of the 60s? Sounds kind of like Positraction (independent rear suspension) or Hydromatic (automatic) transmissions.

"Super Cruise" sounds a little like one of those.

Just a contract renegotiation?

Lots of big companies go through this whenever a service contract is up -- they put it out for bid again and whoever is cheapest wins. Microsoft used to have 2 providers (Prometric and Vue) but something tells me they don't want to support that anymore. In the late 90s/early 00s, certification and training were huge businesses and made a lot of money for Microsoft. I don't have any data, but I doubt people are getting certified at the rates they once were, so they need to cut the costs. I know I haven't taken a cert exam in a while (since 2003 actually,) but I might end up doing it for the new Server 2012 R2 stuff just so I can keep it on the resume. People knock certs, but I know that lots of large companies use them as a first resume filter.

The other thing they could be doing (though I wonder about whether they would) is leveraging Azure to build up a full system environment for a test taker. So instead of the stupid memory tests you get now, you would just be told to complete a series of tasks within a given time allotment. If the environment resembles what they're looking for at the end of the test, you pass. I'd actually like this a lot more. My memory is awful and not having access to Google during a test makes me turn in (IMO) lower scores than I otherwise could have gotten.

Good idea if they don't mess it up

I'm sure the Linux community would sneer even harder than the Windows community at "paper MCSE" type Linux certifications. However, there is something to be said for an absolute minimum standard for candidates.

The problem with doing this in "Linux" is how they get around the fact that every distribution does things slightly differently. Red Hat has its own certification, and so does SuSE. So, hopefully a certification like the one they're talking about transcends testing how to drive the admin GUI and modify the RH or SuSE tree of /etc files to make system changes.

Any sort of vendor-agnostic qualification is a good thing. Skill sets vary so wildly that hiring someone means giving them ridiculous tests to see if they're lying about their experience. Being able to stop that might be a good thing.

More bubbly goodness

The fact that these Bubble 2.0 companies are on such an acquisition tear that they can't be bothered to go to an investment bank is pretty clear evidence that everything is going to come crashing down very soon.

That said, it sounds like the investment banking industry is experiencing the same contraction that other service/agent/middleman sectors have been. Now that online real estate listings exist, it's harder for the agents to justify charging 6% (both on the buying and selling end). It was easier when they were the only ones who knew houses were for sale and had the huge binder of Polaroids. The only places that still have high-priced liaisons involved are car dealers (legally protected market in the US,) and the medical industry (private insurance in the US ensures a huge staff of office managers/billing and coding people, etc.) I know no one is going to shed too many tears for the banking industry, but it's just the continuation of a trend.

The one thing I do worry about is the loss of these liaison positions in the economy...millions of people in the middle class are in the middle class because they have a nice stable job being the agent/liaison/whatever. This has the potential to kick them out the same way de-unionization and offshoring kicked factory workers out.

Why are so many celebrities depressed and/or suicidal??

It's a sad thing when anyone feels they need to kill themselves to feel better. But one thing I don't understand and just can't get my head around is why celebrities, star athletes, incredibly rich people, etc. are prone to suicide.

If you're a celebrity, making even one blockbuster movie or TV show will set you up financially for several lifetimes. Business owners who sell a successful company or cash out at an IPO never have to worry about working ever again if they don't want to. Given how much of a worry money is to most people, you would think that these people would have absolutely nothing to be depressed about. And even if they did, they would have nearly infinite resources to buy whatever they wanted, travel wherever they wanted, etc. to make up for it. On top of all that, celebrities have millions of people following their every move and hanging on their every word.

It just doesn't make sense to me. If I had the kind of resources that these people have access to, I certainly wouldn't be depressed.

Fun with integration...

This kind of stuff is actually my job (software/hardware/systems integration.) I don't work for VCE, but I deal a lot with this all-too-typical situation. It's often a huge headache being the "make this stuff work together guy" and adding multiple vendors to the mix all blaming each other just takes it to a whole new level. This job does keep me out of 24/7 ops mode, however I can't tell you how many hours have been spent literally refereeing vendor fights over late night conference calls.

The problem with these integrated stack vendors is that, often, they're so big and unwieldy that Group A who provides the storage array firmware doesn't know that Group B just changed the iSCSI NIC firmware to a rev that's incompatible with Group C's latest compute node hardware rev. The problem rolls up at a human-visible level as "server can't see the storage array" and it takes a lot of troubleshooting to walk back through the entire connectivity tree. So when you get an Oracle Exadata stack, or a VBlock, you get "This recipe worked when we shipped the units." It's slightly easier than trying to marry an HP blade system with a NetApp filer over Juniper switchgear, but you can often run into the exact same problem. If you run into a problem in between recipe releases....that's where the whole "converged system" thing breaks down.

Sometimes the IT exec crowd doesn't realize that there are humans at these companies doing all this work behind the scenes. Humans make typos in documents. Humans also can't test every single little corner case. And when things blow up, you're still relying on humans (a combo of yours and the vendor's) to sit down and figure out what needs to be fixed. One thing that people don't realize is that the squeeze on salaries and entry level IT work dries up the pipeline for truly good systems people. I'm no genius and would never claim to be a "rockstar" or other idiotic term. but doing these kinds of systems integration tasks does require a highly developed troubleshooting skill set. It takes someone with a lot of experience to pull apart a mess and figure out what broke without making the situation worse or losing customer data.

A vendor can sell you a rack-in-the-box, but they need to back that up with talented integration people...and nothing is foolproof. Stuff like this will always happen.