Count Your Blessings #20 – Having Enough

Castle Howard

This blog is written primarily to myself – listen to yourself Graham.

I have enough material wealth – there is absolutely no question about that. I have more than enough personal wealth actually, yet my action and many of my thoughts struggle with that concept. I am, therefore, writing this blog to remind myself of that fact.

There is never any question as to whether or not the Chastney family can afford to eat each day; there is often a question as to whether we will eat too much.

There is never any question as to whether or not we will have somewhere warm and cozy to sleep at night. We have a beautiful house, which is dry and warm with beds that wrap us up and make us feel safe. Sometimes we choose to sleep in a tent; but that’s our choice.

There isn’t even a question, normally, whether we can afford to do something that we really want to do. We can normally afford it and normally we do it.

We can afford to go to the cinema, the theatre, on holiday, visit friends, go out for meals. We can afford to run two cars. We can afford electricity. We can afford fresh water. We can afford insurance for all of the things which we have. We can even afford to insure ourselves. I’m not worrying too much about my financial future in old age, because my pension provision is very good thank you. In short – I have enough, we have enough, we have more than enough.

Unfortunately “I have enough” is a logical statement that I can make but it’s not one that gets through to my inner thoughts or inner spirit. I have spent most of my life struggling to get to my current financial position, and now I have got here I am struggling to turn off the urge to earn more in order to get more. This is of course a curse. It’s a double edged curse. On one side of the curse there is the urge to get more money. In order to fulfill this urge I need to work ever longer and harder, a strive to get into good positions at work. On the other side is the urge to get more things which don’t satisfy, actually the more you have the less they satisfy. It’s a deep seated curse which only the few manage to escape from. I’m not sure I could ever fully escape but I am determined to get it into a much clearer perspective.

How am I planning to deal with the curse? Well there are already a couple of things that I am doing. One, of course, is to make it public that I have enough, and that’s the purpose of this particular muse. The other is to get intentional about giving more money away. Giving money away is a great way of realising that other people can get so much more value out of it than I can.

We have sponsored a child in Africa for a long time; a boy who is sponsored in Jonathan’s name. We have recently started sponsoring a girl too; who is sponsored in Emily’s name. For a terrifyingly small amount of money those two children get so much more value than we would. The way that Emily has connected with this concept has been amazing. Even though all we have is a picture of this girl, Emily has identified with her and her situation in a remarkable way. We also give away to other things – but that’s between us and God. My intention is to keep down that track, giving it away has to be a good way of keeping the curse under control.

I’m trying to decide what else I should do, there are a couple of ideas but they haven’t quite crystallised yet.

It is a real blessing to have enough. It’s a curse not to realise it.

The real question at the back of all of this is the question of priorities. Is it important that I have more things? Is it important that I have more money? Jesus had some things to say about this:

“Don’t hoard treasure down here where it gets eaten by moths and corroded by rust or–worse!-stolen by burglars. Stockpile treasure in heaven, where it’s safe from moth and rust and burglars. It’s obvious, isn’t it? The place where your treasure is, is the place you will most want to be, and end up being.”


Matthew 6

Solution Architecture – Being One Step Away

Volume

One of the things I find challenging as a Solution Architect who delivers solutions to tens of thousands of users is that you know that they don’t understand what it is that you are trying to achieve, the constraints that you were working under, or the things that you had to go through to get there.

Today I was sat in a plane travelling to one of my customers sites and behind me were two individuals who had been given a new laptop as part of one of my projects. They were talking about their experience which on the whole was OK; but then the issue started coming out. There primary issue was with an application that they both used and had errors. In client refresh projects it’s always the applications which are the major problem. It doesn’t matter how much testing you do there is absolutely no way of testing all of the functions and combinations, so you always have problems. But then came the comment which demonstrated the lack of understanding which is my problem – “You would have thought that a professional organisation like that could deliver applications that worked”.

I wanted to jump up out of my chair and go and sit between them and explain the multi-tiered testing process that their application would have been through. I wanted to explain how their own organisation would have defined an application owner who should have thoroughly tested the functions of the application that they use. I wanted to explain that the main reason for application problems were security settings that were necessary to project their environment and to maintain their accreditation regime.

Being a reserved and polite British person I sat where I was and said nothing. Perhaps I should have given these two gentlemen some of my time and then they could have become advocates for the project in the rest of the business. But I didn’t. Instead I sat there and pondered the whole issue of complicated projects and our inability to communicate to people in a way that they understand that IT never delivers a perfect solution and that we would do our best to assist them. I also considered the ever increasing complexity in the infrastructure caused by more and more applications being deployed. I even considered how much the Internet revolution had so far failed to reduce that complexity for even the simplest task.

But then the plane landed and I decided that I would write something down and conclude with these words “you can please some of the people some of the time; you can never please all of the people all of the time”. My personal challenge is to get to the point where I am comfortable that I did all that I could to deliver the best that I could. It’s also about time people started to understand that they are really pioneers in the IT industry and pioneers need a sense of adventure – which allows for failure.

Extreme Data

Sound

This is just a link, because I think it’s worth one.

Extreme Data: Rethinking the “I” in IT

I’ve read the report and it’s really good at tracking the change in the IT industry that is occurring because data is now available everywhere and for everything.

Exchange Disk Performance Part 2 – and Correction

Outlook

The other day I posted an article on Exchange disk performance and something that was puzzling me. Stu assisted me in finding the correct answer (because the last one was a little flawed).

The flaw was in some information that I didn’t communicate, which lead me to a wrong conclusion. I concluded that the number of disks required was double what the calculation for RAID 0+1 had produced.

I think what I had done was to assume, in my head, that in a mirrored pair that it was only the ‘front’ disk in the mirror that responded to reads, which is of course ridiculous (for most modern hardware). On top of this I didn’t communicate where I got the RAID overhead ratios from.

Clarifying the RAID overhead ratios. For Exchange database storage the ratio of reads to write is something like 3 to 1 according the Optimising Storage for Exchange 2003.

In a RAID 0+1 infrastructure a write requires 2 IO’s. So for 4 IO operations you actually do 5 disk IO’s (3 reads and 2 writes) giving you the RAID impact of .8 (you get 80% of the performance from the volume of disks that you have).

In a RAID 5 configuration a write require 4 IO’s. So for 4 IO operations you actually undertake 7 disk IO’s (3 reads and 4 writes) giving you a RAID impact of .57 (you get 57% of the performance from the volume of disks that you have).

So my calculations were actually correct, but I made the wrong conclusion because of a false assumption – not for the first time, unfortunately not for the last either.

So in order to support 1000 concurrent users you need:

  • RAID 1 = 7 disks (well 8 actually because you can’t have an odd number)

  • RAID 0+1 = 7 disks NOT 14 as a first concluded (well 8 actually because you can’t have an odd number)

  • RAID 5 = 9 disks

“One pound of learning requires ten pounds of common sense to apply it”. Persian Proverb

No Sex Please, We’re Teenagers

Starting on 6th September at 21:00 BBC 2 is running a three part series challenging a group of 12 teenagers to stay celibate for five months.

In No Sex Please, We’re Teenagers, two Christian youth workers tried to get participants to swap “casual sex for old-fashioned courting rituals”.

They said the young people would be happier if they were in long-term, serious relationships.

“This is not a reality show in the Big Brother sense,” a BBC spokeswoman said. “It is a three-part observational documentary series.”

The teenagers, aged between 15 and 17 and from Harrow, north-west London, attended weekly “Romance Academy” sessions with the youth workers.

SyncToy goes 1.0

StartI tried SyncToy in the beta and it worked great for the purposes I was using it. I’ve not upgrade to 1.0 and it’s still great.

A few changes during the beta process, but nothing that really affects me.

Exchange and RAID Levels

Outlook

I have recently been trying to put together the logic and reasoning behind the clear Microsoft recommendation that Exchange 2003 services are hosted on RAID 1+0 and not RAID 5. RAID 5 being for those people who had money constraints. All of the reasoning stated seems to be based on the need for IO performance.

Due to the way that a write occurs each RAID level can be given a factor. If RAID 0 is a factor of 1, then RAID 1 (or 1+0) is 0.8 in terms of performance and RAID 5 is 0.57.

So the logic goes a bit like this:

Each online user does something like 0.5 IOPS and a 10K drive does about 100 IOPS. So a single drive can support 200 concurrent users. With RAID factors built in the users per drive are 160 for RAID 1 and only 114 for RAID 5. So you get better performance from RAID 1 disks. But here is the rub; no-one would implement RAID 1 they would all implement RAID 1+0 so you actually only get 80 users per disk for RAID 1+0, or in other words you need two disks to get the 160. In a RAID 5 set the resilience is already factored into the performance numbers.

So in order to support 1000 concurrent users you need:

  • RAID 1 = 7 disks

  • RAID 1+0 = 14 disks

  • RAID 5 = 9 disks

What’s more, as every Exchange administrator knows, you need loads of spare space on a server to do all of those maintenance tasks, and also it adds a little to the performance. With RAID 1+0 you get 7 disks worth, with RAID 5 you get 8 disks worth of storage.

Having blown the IOPS argument out of the water, there must be something more to it, and this is where I think that the real reasoning comes in. In the case of a failure a RAID 5 set will slow down significantly because all of its information is having to be calculated from parity information on the other disks. A RAID 1+0 set will not suffer from such an overhead because it isn’t having to calculate from parity information, it’s just reading the other disk that is a mirror of the one that has failed. The really worrying part is that I suspect Microsoft have focussed on the IO issue because they don’t want money strapped managers to implement RAID 5 because the disaster tolerance sell isn’t high on their priority list.

Count Your Blessings #19 – Silly Days Out

Sue and I have some really great friends, people who we share the most amazing memories with. As a bunch of friends we do sophisticated things together; going to the theatre and having quiet days.

Yesterday we had a day of silliness. We could have been sophisticated, but it was great to be silly. For me ‘silly’ days are those days when you sit back and you list the activities that you did and you say ‘we did what?’.

Yesterday’s day of silliness was spent in Southport. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying that Southport is silly, just that we did silly things.

We started at the Botanic Gardens which are nice and pretty. Straight away the silliness set in. We hired rowing boats and rowed our way around the lake/pond/green and slimy patch of water. There are only two children in this group, the rest of us a decidedly middle-aged or definitely moving that way. But we are only middle-aged on the outside.

I have to admit that it took me a little while to get going, but once I let myself relax I was off.

After the rowing the park had even more delights. Next up, the crazy golf and from there onto the little ‘train thing’ that gives you a tour of the park (It’s really more like an old peoples buggy with a few trailers behind it). Jonathan sat there all embarrassed because one of his teachers also sat on the train. I don’t think we did anything to ease his embarrassment as we waved at every passer by (and there were lots of them).

From the Botanical Gardens we went into Southport proper, parking on the beach. Walking into town along the pier we cheered at the kids in the skater park doing their acrobatics. Some were a little coy, but most loved all the attention.

The fun wasn’t finished there though, the Jet Boat was next. Everyone in front of us had looked very calm and collected as they left the boat, we decided to bit a little less reserved about it and cheered all the way around the 2 minute course. Apparently the driver enjoyed the fact that we were enjoying it and gave us a little longer than anyone who had gone before us. Emily shouted so much that her mouth dried out and she couldn’t talk at the end.

We finished our time in Southport being the last people sat outside Costa, with the staff tiding up around us. It almost got to the point where there was one table in the middle of the street with us sat around it.

It was a great fun. I’d like to be able to say that it was like being a child again, but we never did things like that as children (not that I remember anyway).

Sometimes we can focus too much on being sophisticated, on doing things that have a purpose. Some times it’s best to do something with absolutely no purpose other than to have fun. As a Christian it is easy for me to look at the world around and to see all that needs to be done; but I firmly believe that God loves his children to enjoy life in all it’s fullness. For me days of silly fun are part of that fullness. Silly days with specials friends makes that experience so much richer.

I believe that God had a hand in creating the world we dwell in and I believe that His hand didn’t just bring form and function but also a bit of fun. As I look at creation I marvel at the strangeness and diversity of it all but I also  think that some of it looks like it has been created the way it is as a bit of fun. Sometimes that fun is just a little silly. The Hammerhead Shark may be a born killer – but it definitely looks silly.

WinFS – it's a big deal and now it's a Beta 1

York Museum Gardens

Channel 9 has a great video showing some of the early power of WinFS. This is a big deal and the demo’s look great.

Although the file system is as basic a filing system as you could imagine I know loads of people who simply do not think in that type of structured manner. They think by tags and categories and types.

WinFS will make it possible for these people to get the visualisations they require without compromising the safety of the data, or their productivity. Whilst the Beta 1 looks great in terms of the foundation, it will be the different UI experiences that make it a truly big deal.

Multiple paths to the same end make for an absolute nightmare for support though. Image that someone is used to getting there in a particular way and the support person tells them a different way; what will they do?

IT Power Consumpton

SleepJonathan Schwartz talks to the issue of IT power consumption particularly in the data centre. In true American fashion his main reasoning is the cost of oil and the cost of real estate. The environment gets a tiny mention;  even tinier than his dig at Dell and their delivery of servers that consume huge amounts of power.

Even so, an industry wide initiative to reduce power and heat would be most welcome.

Stu applies Emergency Service Best Practice Incident Management to IT

Maize MazeStu: “The important thing with any incident is command and control with an associated communications plan. So often I see outages where one engineer is working on resolution but is constantly pulled away from the task to talk to his manager, then the service delivery manager, then the account manager, then the project manager …….. and on and on.”

Typepad – New Features

Outlook

New features in TypePad mean that I can now include a feed in my side-bar with ease, so I’ve added my del.icio.us feed and a feed for Happenings. I’ve already found them quite useful myself.

You’ll have to visit the site to see though. Alternatively you could subscribe to the feeds that I’m presenting. It’s a free world out there so I’ll let you decide.

(Typing still slow, but getting there)