Good enough is the driving force

I was having a chat with a colleague about the changing nature of the industry, he’s a Unix Server Manager running a small team in the city for a financial institution. It started from his conversations that they were completing the last phase of their migration from midrange (that is high end Unix hardware) to commodity x64 servers running Linux (in this case Red Hat).

He was talking about his challenge, he loves his midrange platforms:

“..everything is tested, built right and just works…’, ‘…it’s so much more efficient…’ we can do ‘so much more with less’ and that the ‘licensing is more efficient’.

It was at this point I asked him few points and reminded him some of today’s home truths:

• We’re about ‘good enough’ to perform that task or job at cost
• The rules of engagement are based around the lowest total cost – I can’t afford to have engineers debating hardware platforms and their respective efficiencies until the end of time.
• Commodity hardware is re-deployable, if project A finds out it’s not required, it goes back into the pool and can be re-used for the next project, it’s mainstream, with midrange we’ll use it but not necessarily instantly.
• Efficiency and licensing statistics are end user specific – give me any application, any usage scenario and there will be hundreds of solutions each with their own benefits in licensing, in hardware volume, performance or scale.

As with anything midrange, high end Unix solutions indeed mainframe has it’s place but both are industrial grade enterprise solutions, not every application nor business needs industrial grade infrastructure.

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