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SXSW interactive is Mar 9-13 and I"ll be in Austin, TX http://sxsw.com/interactive
One of the questions some of us have is "Are data centers relevant at SXSW?"
Given the amount of high technology companies you would assume so.
I'll see how much I learn and what i can blog about.
We all use a DVR and for a while I had a Tivo DVR. A year ago I cancelled the service when my family wanted to go back to Comcast. But just this week I get a renewal notice for my cancelled service.
Looking up on my charge statement, Tivo had charged me for service in 2011 even though I cancelled. I called Tivo, and they knew they had me and they refused to refund the charge. They said the customer service person had kept my annual service alive so i could sell an active box. How is this a cancellation of my service?
Going back and forth, Tivo tried to upsell me on another service for a monthly fee.
My question to them is "Why should I continue service with you when you take my money provide no service for a year?" "How is canceling my service equate to charging me the annual fee so I can sell the box?"
My next steps are to fire this off to the Better Business Bureau as my credit card company can't do anything for the charge given the age of it.
Watching this happen to myself, reminds me of other data center vendors who focus on maximizing their revenue and putting the client in the bind of having little choice but to eat the costs to fix the mistakes made by picking the wrong vendor.
In the same way that Tivo is a short timer with horrible customer service, there are some other vendors out there that will be falling off the map as they have no problem with horrible customer service.
It can be impossible to find this type of information disclosed anywhere, but if you know who to talk to you can find out what really works and what doesn't. The data center vendors can benefit from people not wanting to air their dirty laundry.
My mistake: I trusted a Tivo customer support to cancel my subscription when I told them to. A charge showed up on my credit card three months later, and I neglected to audit my credit card statement for a charge I didn't expect. Shame on me for trusting Tivo.
Two of my friends and I have been discussing a variety of technical and business decisions that need to be made. One of the things we have done is to make it a rule that all three of us need to be in agreement on decisions. Having three decision makers is a good pattern to insure that a diversity of perspectives are included in analysis, and decisions can be made if one decision maker is not available.
Triple redundancy though is typically used though where as long as two systems are in agreement than you can make a decision.
In computing, triple modular redundancy, sometimes called triple-mode redundancy,[1] (TMR) is a fault-tolerant form of N-modular redundancy, in which three systems perform a process and that result is processed by a voting system to produce a single output. If any one of the three systems fails, the other two systems can correct and mask the fault.
But, an example of the flaw in this approach could be taken from the Minority Report and the use of pre-cogs where a zealousness to come to a conclusion allows a "minority report" to be discarded.
Majority and minority reports
Each of the three precogs generates its own report or prediction. The reports of all the precogs are analyzed by a computer and, if these reports differ from one another, the computer identifies the two reports with the greatest overlap and produces a majority report, taking this as the accurate prediction of the future. But the existence of majority reports implies the existence of a minority report.
James Hamilton has a blog post on error detection. Errors could be consider the crimes in the data center. And, you can falsely assume there are no errors (crimes) because there is error correction in various parts of the system.
Every couple of weeks I get questions along the lines of “should I checksum application files, given that the disk already has error correction?” or “given that TCP/IP has error correction on every communications packet, why do I need to have application level network error detection?” Another frequent question is “non-ECC mother boards are much cheaper -- do we really need ECC on memory?” The answer is always yes. At scale, error detection and correction at lower levels fails to correct or even detect some problems. Software stacks above introduce errors. Hardware introduces more errors. Firmware introduces errors. Errors creep in everywhere and absolutely nobody and nothing can be trusted.
If you think like this.
This incident reminds us of the importance of never trusting anything from any component in a multi-component system. Checksum every data block and have well-designed, and well-tested failure modes for even unlikely events. Rather than have complex recovery logic for the near infinite number of faults possible, have simple, brute-force recovery paths that you can use broadly and test frequently. Remember that all hardware, all firmware, and all software have faults and introduce errors. Don’t trust anyone or anything. Have test systems that bit flips and corrupts and ensure the production system can operate through these faults – at scale, rare events are amazingly common.
Maybe you won't let the majority rule and listen to minority. All it takes is a small system, a system in the minority to bring down a service.
I was at a the Open Compute Summit that Facebook hosted in NYC, and one of the data center executives was sucked into a sales conversation and sold quite flagrantly, interrupting our group's conversation. At an industry event where people have paid admission fees and/or exhibit fees many sales people think it is their right to sell the attendees. You have little hope of doing anything to get an aggressive salesman to leave you alone.
Then it hit me after the salesman left. We should have yellow and red cards for attendees to flag fragrant behavior. I've order a few of these for a group of us to use in a week.
We are hosting our own event, so we can create our own rules. We'll have fun with this idea.
Here is the record for yellow and red cards in a soccer match.
There are many reasons why the public could is popular. MSNBC has a post on how executives hate their jobs just as much as lower level employees.
Execs are just like you: They don't like their jobs, either
By Allison Linn
If you feel stuck in a job you don’t like, maybe you can take comfort in the fact that the big boss may well be in the same boat.
A new global survey of business executives finds that less than half like their jobs, although most don’t plan on leaving.
The Path Forward, a survey of 3,900 business executives from around the world conducted by consulting firm Accenture, found that only 42 percent said they were satisfied with their jobs. That’s down slightly from 2010.
And, reading about the Power of Habits reminded of a possible reason for the displeasure. The fact that some companies are a civil war.
Companies aren’t big happy families where everyone plays together nicely. Rather, most workplaces are made up of fiefdoms where executives compete for power and credit, often in hidden skirmishes that make their own performances appear superior and their rivals’ seem worse. Divisions compete for resources and sabotage each other to steal glory.
Companies aren’t families. They’re potential battlefields in a civil war.
Then it hit me that the Data Center is the one place that all theses families (internal company teams) need to put their information. What other place other than finance has the whole organization connecting. The finance scenario is actually probably easier as it ultimately a money issue. But, enterprise IT is very complex.
If you accept this difficulty of having everyone get along in enterprise IT which can be wearing and frustrating, then maybe people just want to escape the mental anguish and feuding between groups. The lower costs and better service of a cloud environment like AWS could be the side benefits when the ultimate reason was the frustration dealing with central enterprise IT. If you accept this as a potential reason for why users have gone to the public cloud, they are not going to be satisfied with a private cloud run by the central enterprise IT.