backup software
storage news
| storage manufacturers backup software storage news |
|
|
 | ||||||||
|
|
| |||||||||||
| Survival of the Fittest -
when Diskosaurs Ruled the Earth. In the early 1980s it was fashionable for some of the lean and mean companies I worked for to house their R & D departments in portakabins. In case you live outside the UK and haven't come across this term before, these were low cost temporary modular buildings, which depending on your view, could be regarded being as mid way in structural terms between a garden shed and a garage. For fast growing companies in the over regulated and crowded UK, these had the advantage of bypassing most of the local planning restrictions which applied to more permanent structures. Also they were quick and easy to put up. It's interesting to note that many of these temporary structures are still around twenty years later. In retrospect I now wonder if maybe there was a Darwinian theory at work in the mindset of the management at work here. "Survival of the fittest" - as applied to development engineers could mean that after a bitterly cold winter the management would come and see which engineers had survived till the spring. That cut out a lot of management angst if downsizing was needed - due to the natural wastage. Another advantage to management was that hiding your software engineers in portakabins, meant that your customers, who got the company tour round the prettier parts of the corporate park, wouldn't be scared off buying your new products by chance meetings with some of the strange looking geeks who actually designed them. Of course the economic advantage of low cost building for the skunk works became crystal clear, when I too became management in the mid 80s and started my own VC backed company in my garage. So the advantages of portakabins to the lean and mean school of management were:- they solved your problems with the planning authorities, saved building cost, and filtered out the hiring mistakes made by your HR department. But the main disadvantage of portakabins was the adverse effect it had on the computers. During the cold months of winter the first person to arrive would have to turn on all the development computers and let them warm up. That's because if you tried using them for anything during the first twenty minutes or so - they just wouldn't work. The disk drives were very cold, possibly dripping with condensation and needed a good warm up before they would operate reliably. We didn't dare leave them switched on all night because these R & D computers usually had a lot of prototype hardware plugged into them and even a temporary building is better than none, which is what you might get if someone's overheated bipolar TTL circuits caught fire in the middle of the night. You also got that problem with MOS if you got the voltage levels wrong. This isn't vacuum tube technology I'm talking about it. This was the state of the art in 2nd generation microprocessor development systems from the likes of Intel, Motorola, AMD, Zilog etc. We didn't have this problem with the first generation stuff in the 1970s - because - hell we didn't have disk drives in those days. After a day's programming in hand coded assembler - we'd just save the stuff onto an EPROM or paper tape. We put up with the unreliability of the new fangled disk drives because we got fed up with doing all that hex stuff, and even though each new desktop computer cost more than any of our houses, we needed the speed up to cope with spec changes, big development teams etc. This symptom of waiting for the equipment to warm up and dry out a bit before use became less of a problem in the late 80s as disk technology improved and became less sensitive to temperature. However, anyone who was involved in sales of computers in the mid to late 80s may remember that the first customer demonstration of the day - would often fail - particularly if the stuff had spent the previous night stored in the back of your car. Later, as the prices of computers dropped to the level where it was no longer economical to take equipment on the road (or do any demos at all) many of these problems vanished. But on the plus side, the sensitivity of disk drives to self destruct at the slightest drop onto a hard surface made safer drivers of us all. I remember the sinking feeling I had when our hired van hit a "sleeping policeman" traffic bump too fast as we drove in for a trade show, and I wondered how many of the workstations in the back would actually boot up. If you're one our younger readers and were actually born in the 1970s or early 80s - you probably think this regression into history shows what a lot of junk the equipment was we worked with back then. You're used to notebooks, and add in cards for your PDA or MP3 player which can travel anywhere, survive bumps, snow and tropical beaches. Your computer gadgets go where you go and you expect them to work when you switch them on. Damn right. OK - but if it wasn't for the biplanes - we wouldn't have today's fighter jets. Which reminds me... Even back in the prehistoric days of the diskosaurs - which could go flaky if you looked at them the wrong way - there was another class of computer equipment that was being carried around in jeeps and helicopters and could be sprayed with water or dropped and still work just fine. You had to be quite strong to carry what the military used to call a "portable computer" - because the batteries alone could put a strain on your back. But there were computer companies working out what the problems were, and solving them even that long ago. The resulting solutions cost quite a lot more than their civilian counterparts, but they would survive where nothing else would. Today, many of the problems which face companies in their storage systems aren't related to temperature, vibration or humidity. Today's problems may be that you want 100% uptime, you want 100% security (a virus free hacker free system on which your life can depend). You also want to be able to buy spares or upgrades in 10 years time, and don't want to be forced into a major redesign of your business because the hardware isn't going to be available when part of your mission critical system dies of old age. There's still a lot that can be learned about the future of storage technology by looking at what the military are doing today. They're solving problems which you might not care about now, but they've got a good track record of pioneering a lot of the technologies which really make computers reliable. |
| goblinsearch | STORAGEsearch | SPARC Product Directory | ACSL - the publisher |
