making IT happen : an infrastructure blog » Musings

Some humor

tkyle — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 03:56:51 +0000

As we all know, one of the things that will help you the most in an IT career is an ability to stand back and laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. Whether it’s making fun of programmers, project managers, or “reminiscing” about NetWare crashing and crashing, there’s always something to laugh about in IT.

Of course, there’s nothing funnier in IT than the movie “Office Space.” I once had a research psychiatrist tell me that she thought it was a funny movie, so I corrected her, dryly explaining that the movie was actually a documentary about life in IT. Here’s the famous “What Would You Say You Do Here?” scene, parodied by CRC Data Protection.

Here’s another great one. Incredibly, it is for IBM’s mainframe division! It parodies the lonely life of the mainframe sales team, done in the style of “The Office.”

With the hardware these days…

tkyle — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 01:30:10 +0000

Kevin Closson gives those of us who aren’t pushing a million IOPS several reasons to consider the Sunacle Exadata 2 Database Thingamajig.

Unfortunately, Kevin failed to mention a potential downside of having one of these babies.Â Namely, your developers and consultants will assume (even more than they probably already do) that whatever junk code they throw at the machine will run flawlessly.Â And if it doesn’t, it must be the DBA or Unix team’s fault.

EMC outrage over Oracle “not supporting” VMware?

tkyle — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 03:30:48 +0000

Am I the only one who thinks it a little entertaining that a bunch of EMC bloggers are going crazy over Oracle not supporting VMware (an EMC subsidiary)?Â Particularly a week after Oracle showed off its new Exadata beast made from the (soon-to-be-Oracle) Sun parts bin?

I don’t have a dog in this fight, but it seems a bit strange that one vendor (EMC) is asking its customers to harangue another vendor (Oracle).Â This is the bad part about using best-of-breed – there’s always the potential for finger-pointing.Â Why remind customers of this right when a competitor is going vertical, instead of highlighting how much better value you might be able to provide?

Oracle + Sun = IBM. Wait, what?

tkyle — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:48:11 +0000

The Register is reporting that Larry Ellison has been telling folks that with the pending Sun acquisition, Oracle is positioning itself to become the next, old IBM.

My big takeaway is that Oracle has positioned itself as a soup-to-nuts vendor.Â That is, they will be able to sell you every part of the system, from the SPARC server running Solaris, to the StorageTek tape backup, to the Oracle database, to the business application, which just happens to be written in Java.

This isn’t too terribly different from what Jonathan Schwartz was saying recently, that Sun provided the technology stack.Â Except that Sun had no applications to tie into – particularly since so many Oracle customers jumped ship and ran to Linux in the last decade.Â Obviously, Oracle now has plenty of reason to try to convince everyone to return.

Whether or not the strategy works,Â I still think Solaris is the best operating system on the block, and would love to see a reinvigorated SPARC platform as a viable option.