Try, Try Again, Until It's Right

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the item Try, Try Again, Until It's Right

  • 1.9PB of data?  Well, that maybe is their first problem.  As usual, my first question is 'Do we really NEED to keep this sh!t?

    The designers of their systems better have a way to handle changes/upgrades in segments.   Then they also better get a good summarization plan in place.  Experience has taught me that much of our detail loses value as it ages.

    My perspective goes back to the single-platter removable 15" disk in devicies the size of refrigerators, and we had exactly two.  Tape drives were six feet tall and three feet wide, and we had exactly two of those.  We had to archive data by merging into a tape-to-tape process to free up disk storage space.  And this was before we had a multi-taking OS.  We did historical analysis by remounting different tapes in series every few minutes.  And lots of this had to be done on weekends to avoid interrupting daily production.  We had to design for doing batch processing while union-wage data entry operators took their coffee and lunch breaks.

     

    Rick
    Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )

  • Did they offer any other size metrics? The transaction rate would probably be really impressive.

    How would you rank them?

  • skeleton567 wrote:

    while union-wage data entry operators took their coffee and lunch breaks.

    Are you familiar with Taylorism?

  • Robert Sterbal-482516 wrote:

    skeleton567 wrote:

    while union-wage data entry operators took their coffee and lunch breaks.

    Are you familiar with Taylorism?

    No, I had to look that one up.  You may not be old enough to know those days when our OS did only one thing at a time.  The machine did no multitasking, so I had to do it instead.

    I was the first tech guy in that shop which ran 24-hours a day, so with union data entry operators if anything out-of-the ordinary happened, I had to get up and go in any time day or night to take care of things.   The 'operators' could do nothing more than start a program running via the console by copying commnds from a sheet of paper and then sit at their terminals to enter data.

    Sometimes, if I was lucky, my operator would read back to me messages from the console over the phone:

    "It says to me ...blah,blah,blah".

    "And then it says to me ...blah,blah,blah.

    He was allowed to type in commands as long as I dictated what to enter.  If that didn't work, I had to drive 15 miles in to fix things while they sat and waited.

    Rick
    Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )

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