KJ - I respectfully disagree with your assessment. Here is the proof.
With the advent of the internet, the shops buying most of the FC products today are 24 x 7. There is no longer such a thing as a maintenance window or downtime window.
When you say that nobody should be doing configuration management in a normal operating environment, then you are incorrect (or perhaps dating yourself to the late 1990's).
So, according to your comment "Nobody should be doing configuration management during a normal operating environment", then you will potentially prevent any 24x7 environment such as visa, brokerage houses, the air traffic system, from operating. In the next 3-4 years, business will have 10X more data then they have today. You don't allow people to add any.
Also just saying that the hardware doesn't fail often isn't relative. There is a lot of push from many vendors to go from the 4 9's to 5 9's for reliability and availability. (99.9999 to 99.99999 up time). They are paying big bucks for this as well.
At the storagenetworking show last week in Palm Springs, WHICH I ATTENDED, there were several segments on the 5 9's, as well as the 24x7 problem.
The person that talked about the new paradigm the most was probably Dan Warmenhoven, CEO of Network Appliance, who delivered the keynote presentation. In fact, I have the slideset. Let me quote him, "data access is the real issue today ... backup windows, reconfiguration windows are unacceptable ... we are in a global 24 x 7 environment ... HP, IBM, SUN, CPQ have all lost storage marketshare, while EMC/NetApps has gained marketshare. That is because of high-availability, and storage management software."
But others such as Wayne Richard, CTO of Gadzoox, and Brian Maloney, CEO of AT&T Solutions got into these subjects as well. |
