October 30, 2008

Excel, VPS’s and Things That Go Bump in the Night

Brian Jones over at his blog kinda lays waste to two IT tools — Excel and Virtual Private Servers. Brian seems to be a pretty bright, that’s why his blog is on my RSS feed. But I have a different view on the two issues.

Excel] As a data storage engine Excel or OOSpreadsheet are NOT the way to go. But as a presentation engine into an existing database either tool excels in that role if you will pardon the pun. You fire up ODBC or Jet or your interface weapon of choice and carve away. Short of a report writer or BI suite, this can be the cat’s meow.

As to the IT-Customer interface. I lay that at IT’s feet. 30 years in the IT business and I have never understood the priesthood mentality. IT is chartered with keeping and protecting the data, but not making it inaccessible. Nor is it that hard to accomplish either. The majority of businesses have their data sitting on several stripes of a RAID array. It would not be that weird to duplicate that to a customer facing server, publish a catalog of the tables content and a manual of interface techniques. Hell if you need, make it read only. Automate the update process to keep it current. The AdHoc ankle biters would melt away.

VPS] This is a tad tougher and I have to say Brian is pretty much on mark. However lets be clear here. There is a separation between the technology and the business practices that are applied to it.

That ‘Data Hausfrau Inc’ offers a $2.95 VPS/mo one should not expect much. At that level of pricing its YOYO — Your On Your Own. Now personally I can live with that so long as the provider can supply a decent level of bandwidth for the price so backups don’t take as long as viewing the 10 Commandents on BlueRay. I have even been known to once or twice use VPS providers as part of a transition plan. Move the website to the provider, swing the DNS to it. Do what I need to do on the hardware side, then swing the site and the DNS back.

VPS as a technology? I do it quite often, OpenVZ, Parallels, KEMU, VirtualBox. I have clients, own their machinery and are quite satisfied with the results. But the customer is in control of it all. Which is a key difference in delivery. The technology is reasonably mature as delivered by most of the big players. There are some pieces I have learned from it all –

Rarely does the consumer need root access to the container. One can give the consumer sufficient rights to get the job done short of root/Admin.
Somebody has to have a VM management strategy. Yes cloning and moving VM’s is a great benefit. But has diligence been applied equivalent to one used to do with backups? And oh please, if your firm’s disaster plan is to utilize copies of VM’s moved to a backup server; have you tried it in practice? You better, as the consequences of failure are pretty grim.
Consider whether your Virtualization supplier will be around for the long haul. With the economy contracting it will be an issue. Think carefully, and think exit strategy — can you port your VM’s if vendor X goes belly up?