One of the things about network servers is that you don't really think about where they are. Okay, so I have a source control server that I use at work that keeps our source code. Where is it physically located? I know what subnet it's connected to, but that subnet serves two whole labs plus a storage area. Where is the machine physically located?
Sometimes this is hilarious, like when a university discovered their most reliable server drywalled into a wall four years after it had been last seen. But one thing I'll note is that virtualization has given us an even better way of doing things. Now we can lose virtual machines in a whole cloud of hosts! Which host is a virtual machine on? Only the Shadow knows :).
-- Badtux the Geeky Penguin
Preaching to the choir brother, I am not as enthusiastic about this whole new Cloud push as the people pitching it are.
ReplyDeleteJ.Comando
Well, you *do* realize that you're reading a blog that's floating in the Cloud, right? :).
ReplyDeleteThing is, I think corporate data centers that are moving to server consolidation under things like ESXi are barking up the wrong tree. Virtual servers need just as much maintenance as real servers (their only advantage is that when their old hardware dies you can more easily move them to new hardware), and you can lose track of them even more easily. We're consolidating a bunch of old servers onto ESXi at work, but that's because we don't feel like upgrading the server OS on those servers and the old OS doesn't support the new hardware but will run just fine under ESXi's emulation of old hardware. But we're not under the delusion that this will make our job somehow easier, because while we have less physical hardware to deal with, now we have the virtualization system to deal with!
- Badtux the Geeky Penguin
hahahaha. I used to work for a large retail chain. One of our stores had their entire server closet drywalled in and it was about a year later that the server finally had a problem and needed to be rebooted. I can't remember how the store manager finally figured out where it was though.
ReplyDeleteI like cloud computing and my current employer certainly relies on it. I was trying to explain the concept to one of our customers so I told her that it was like the old dumb terms and mainframes. She had no idea what I was talking about and then I realized how old I am that I remember such things.