Oh, that one. Sorry, I forgot about them, as I’m not a regular reader of tech snark, I get too much of it in real life.
]]>Le Reg is kinda like ‘The Daily Show’ they have to wrap up the news in comedy so they can be uber critical of coy’s like M$ and not get sued. 😆 Besides.. we looooove satire! 😀
]]>It is a bit disheartening to know that this blog has a more in-depth back-up system in place than a major commercial system.
I hate to break it to the Register, but paper only works until there’s a fire or flood.
]]>Boy… Talk about asking for trouble! Sheesh.
]]>They operate a huge Oracle database system and have to hire an outside contractor to do an update!?
They don’t seem to have a real sysadmin for their server farm, or there would be backups and the update would have been tested before going live.
It almost sounds like they are using day labor for their server farm, or temps at best. It certainly doesn’t sound like a professional organization. I don’t expect anything like an IBM mainframe corporate operation that I started out on, but it doesn’t sound like even the mini-based university systems staffed primarily with students that I started working on as a sysadmin.
I just can’t understand how a major farm can be that slipshod and remain in business. I guess it is part of the arrogance of being a monopoly.
]]>And why they were saying that the data was unrecoverable? Well, because Microsoft fired or drove off anybody who knew anything about the NetApp servers that Danger was using, doh! Windows Server doesn’t snapshot, so of *course* they wouldn’t know about that.
.-= last blog ..Deadly weapons =-.
Actually gaming is the motivator for most IT advances these days, not just multimedia, because of the massive resource use. Multiplayer games are an ultimate test of real-time, interactive systems, so distributed systems and fault tolerance would be vital to success. If Second Life or WoW had been down as long as Sidekick the reaction wouldn’t have been resigned indignation.
The other important point is that the people at the top still understand their product and their customers, as opposed to most of the major IT companies which are “led” by MBAs who need people to deal with their e-mail.
]]>Linden Labs’ Second Life deals with the stored data of millions of accounts (as opposed to customers as each customer may have more than one account). They use a distributed system spread across the USA. I believe, and I could be wrong, that they also have server farms off-shore.
Not only are the computers used to run the virtual world distributed, the simulators which service each region, estate or island, and the asset servers that hold the data associated with each account are also spread out. Back-ups of region simulators occur at least every couple of days.
A weather event or other mishap that disables a server farm might make the whole system slow and wonky until the problem is solved, but it would take a major, nation-wide disaster to bring the grid down completely. If such a disaster were to happen, I doubt very much that people would be worrying about playing Second Life.
One might wonder why such care is lavished on what appears to be nothing more than a MMORPG, but Second Life has its own economy probably equivalent to a small European country (and growing) and has become a corporate work tool, and educational aide as well..
A far cry from a virtual address book…
]]>That was definitely worth a GRRROOaaannn, Steve.
]]>That’s almost correct. Clearly, Microsoft uses half-vast data centers.
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