Today's delicacy is a guest post from Christopher Adams, who blogs at Ramblings of a Christian Geek. What I wouldn't give to secretly observe his inner dialogue for a day.
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The second most important thing every IT Administrator must accomplish is to make the dolphins happy. (The most import thing being to place a second layer of chips and cheese on your nachos; you would be surprised the difference it makes.)
Now that you've replaced your badgers with virtual servers, it is time to prepare for a natural disaster. When tsunamis hit the shores several organizations and businesses lose data and can eventually go bankrupt and require their government to provide funding to replace lost data. This causes a very long lapse in business. The businesses are normally underwater for several days following the hit, at which time dolphins (being the smartest water-dwelling animals) take over.
Many people seem to think that the dolphins would vote on who is in charge, or they would choose the biggest and strongest dolphin, but that is obviously pure fiction. What really happens is they choose the most organized dolphin with analytical skills and appoint them as the data analyst, then they find the dolphin with the Type-A personality and a complete lack of any technical knowledge as a manager. (Dolphins rarely have nice clothing, so whoever has a nice suit normally gets the position of CEO so the company has a good public face.)
Upon swimming into the datacenter, the first thing the IT dolphin looks for is a waterproofed booklet describing the company's disaster recovery plans. Once these are found, they quickly begin draining the server racks, drying the servers, and restoring from backups (or simply updating the router to point to an off-site business continuity disaster site, which is their favorite). If, however, there is no disaster recovery plan the dolphins will get very angry and tear the office apart, feeling cheated and insulted by the humans who built their offices far too close to the ocean. In fact, most tsunamis don't damage buildings, angry dolphins experiencing data loss do. Despite their lack of suits, they have an overabundance of hammers for some reason.
In order to please the dolphins, we use PHDVirtual to back up our VMs and a combination of on-site Crashplan Pro and off-site Jungledisk Server. In the event we lose our Albuquerque location to a tsunami or flash flood, we simply load the VMs onto any off-the-shelf server, fire them up, and connect to our online file backups.
This would please the dolphins.
Happy dolphins will normally make you nachos if you ask nicely.
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As the dolphin in charge of IT for my pod I am so glad this was posted!
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, we have hammers and very little room for forgiveness.