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With DataSynapse GridServer 5 being released, we’ll be approaching the point where we need to upgrade the DataSynapse application to keep in line with their recommendations and support. This raises a debate internally. Is this a project? Or is it a support issue?

There’s generally two ways of work in the enterprise, ‘investment/project’ meaning you get a dedicated resource pool to carry out your work, but this comes out of your budget for man days, for servers, software and everything else – it’s a cost so to speak. Alternatively there is typically ‘support’ activity, support tends to be more less fixed in terms of costs, by that I mean you might pay £3 million a year for IT support of the server estate, by bundling it in with this, it’s an IT cost, not mine.

With this then does the end user (the business unit) pay for the work to be done? Or is it part of general support, the cost of providing a grid infrastructure?

But what about the testing? Testing the applications against the new version of DataSynapse so we can be sure we can proceed with the upgrade in production; this can be time consuming and requires a degree of ‘negotiation’ or checking that everyone’s on the same line, everyone is ready to proceed and understands any pre-requisites, any terms and conditions attached to it, like specific Java versions etc.

The debate is set to continue, in the meantime it might be an opportune moment to detach the infrastructure and the application. To say from next Wednesday we’re going to upgrade the test environment, please validate so that we can leave it a week and upgrade staging, and then production another week later. Let’s not wait for everyone, life really is too short..

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