Last week a close friend was telling me about his recent Lasik surgery. He said he didn’t know how bad his vision had become until the Lasik procedure suddenly brought him back to 20/20. I related that my father-in-law had had the exact same experience when he had cataract surgery; due to the gradually worsening nature of cataracts he had no idea how bad his vision was until it was suddenly fixed by the surgery. My friend then reminded me of the theory of the boiled frog, wherein it is supposedly possible to boil a live frog by placing it in cold water and gradually increasing the heat. Because of the gradual temperature change, the frog never perceives the danger and is cooked to death. (NOTE: I have never tried this, nor do I ever intend to. I will take it as an anecdotal story and leave it at that.)
The boiled frog is a great metaphor for many human situations, and it struck me that the phenomenon is very common in the IT world, particularly as it relates to storage and backup. I deal with IT professionals an almost daily basis who do not realize how dire their situation is because it has gradually crept up on them. Herewith are three admittedly subjective ways to tell whether you are – or are becoming – a boiled frog:
1. Your team spends most of its time managing workarounds. Research has shown that many IT shops spend 70% or more of their time just keeping things running. To a great extent this stems from the management of workarounds that are put in place to compensate for the inadequacies of legacy systems or applications that are just not getting the job done due to inadequate feature sets, poor design or just plain lousy quality. Workarounds are added gradually to compensate, and before you know it you have become primarily a workaround manager. The water is getting warmer.
2. You have your storage and/or backup vendor’s support “fixer” on speed dial. Customer support from some of the global IT vendors has become so bad that they have hired teams people who do nothing but visit customers to patch up disastrous support situations. I call these people “fixers.” This is a great example of the spreadsheet-managed nature of modern corporate bureaucracy: it is cheaper to hire a nationwide team to patch up support problems than it is to simply fix support in the first place. After utilizing the services of your vendor’s a fixer a few times, it begins to feel like the normal way to access support resources, and you’ve just cranked up the temperature a little bit more.
3. You consider a good night’s sleep to be a luxury. The two scenarios above often can lead to this third one. Constant manual management of workarounds and the constant interface with your vendor’s inadequate support resources can gradually create an environment of extreme fragility. Things can go wrong at any moment, and they often do. You find yourself living in a state of constantly heightened alert, waiting for the next system or process to crap out on you. The stress builds up, and a good night’s sleep becomes a thing of the past. Can you feel the water starting to boil?
Think about it; based on the above information, are you a boiled frog? So now the question becomes how to stop this nonsense and get back to a saner, smoother running environment. What I’m about to suggest may sound obvious, but it amazes me how few IT Managers have actually thought it through.
- Take a hard look at the storage and/or backup workarounds you’ve put in place, and analyze the systems that have caused the most trouble from a support standpoint. Are they really necessary? Do they conflict? (This is often the case.)
- If budget dollars are available, consider forklifting out the troublemakers, but be careful to look for new solutions with WORKING features (this is important) that specifically map to the problems of your environment, and that will also accommodate your anticipated future needs. Be wary of distant “coming in a future release” feature roadmaps.
- Test, test, test. Get the gear in and run it through its paces. There is simply no substitute for an onsite evaluation of a potential new solution.
- Talk to existing users, and not just those who are referred to you by the prospective new vendors. Unsolicited customer testimonials are available on SpiceWorks and other services. These services often allow one-on-one contact between members, so reach out and touch a few.
- When you speak to existing users, don’t just ask about the product. Ask them about their support experience with the new vendor; make sure customer support is engineered into the product and not just a slapped-on afterthought.
- Think hard – prior to making a purchase decision – about how the new system will integrate into your existing work flow. Will it really reduce the workload or will it simply push another workaround to the fore that you hadn’t thought about? The objective is to make life easier and reduce the water temperature, not trade one problem for another.
Southern Data Storage can help analyze your storage and/or backup environment and recommend solutions from one of our eight industry leaders – Nimble Storage, Unitrends, NexGen Storage, ExaGrid, Nexsan, GridStore, Veeam and Nasuni – each of whom has had to meet specific criteria in order to be added to our very select line card. These criteria translate specifically to a superior customer experience, and to smoother working, less stress-prone customer environment. If you feel your storage and/or backup systems are slowly boiling you alive, call me at 888-255-6889 or email me at mark@southerndatastorage.com.