Comment Articles

What the IT trenches are saying

Jon Oltsik CNET News.com

Published: 29 May 2003 15:26 BST

My nine-year-old son has become quite an athlete, but after playing third- and fourth-grade basketball and watching the NBA playoffs, he is now convinced that he is NBA-bound.

I encourage his childhood imagination, but offer the practical advice that for every Michael Jordan there are thousands of other basketball players who just aren't good enough to make the pros.

There's an analogy to the information technology world -- not the one that actually exists, but the portrayal of the one said to exist. We read wonderful stories about the IT exploits of companies such as Wal-Mart Stores, Charles Schwab and Federal Express. But these companies inhabit the bleeding edge, with IT departments that do things that most firms don't even dream about. This makes for great press but is about as relevant to the IT masses as NBA superstars are to the multitudes of wanna-be pro hoopsters.

I recently met up with four director-level IT operations managers who work for billion-dollar companies. Each of their firms is considered to be on the cusp of technology, and these folks represent the "Middle England" IT crowd that makes up the silent majority of IT consumers who buy the bulk of equipment, software and services.

In many ways, however, they reflect a different reality from the one commonly thought to be the conventional wisdom in the computer industry. To wit: my friends simply don't care about the battle between Linux and Windows. Their shops run on a mix of mainframe, Unix and Windows servers that are anchored by the IBM iSeries (AS/400). Why? It does the job with nary a hiccup. I know of one company that hasn't experienced any unplanned downtime for more than two years. The AS/400 also offers great operational efficiencies and a lot of the add-on management utilities and middleware for Unix and Windows. What's more, AS/400s enable companies to develop a Web front end for applications so that they can be extended to partners and suppliers.

Storage pundits proclaim that storage utilisation averages about 30 percent. Vendors use this factoid to sell expensive storage area networks and storage resource management (SRM) tools. My buddies had never even heard of SRM. To them, storage utilisation is the responsibility of their system administrators. They couldn't believe it when I told them that typical storage utilisation rates are said to hover around 30 percent.

They claim that their average hovers between 80 percent and 90 percent. As one gang member put it: "If my storage utilisation was 30 percent, I'd be fired." Another said his company won't even consider a storage area network (SAN). "SANs are overrated," he said. "We don't need one now, and when we do, I'll budget for it."