This CTO and his 300 have spent their time at the hot gates stacking up the bodies of competitors while innovating new engineering feats and tactics to keep our muscles and armor strong. Please keep savoring these monthly blogs; we hope you find them both entertaining and informative as we regale our epic adventures.We’re doing things technologically that no one anywhere has ever done because they’ve never had to – LOL. We write (code) a lot of the software ourselves (dinManage, dinDaaS, dinAuth, etc.) and coordinate closely with all hardware vendors to exploit platforms in ways that are both new and demanding (Oh, if my data center walls could talk).
The talent I get to hire/work with and the billionaire Titans of Industry that I meet with as a Cloud CTO is pretty cool! But, it’s not always glamourous: there’s a few very humbling days in between, like last week when the NVRAM battery in one of our legacy redundant “N” platform storage controllers managing a 720TB array with 1,200 spinning disks decides to begin discharging. Tick tock. Think fast Skippy, because life’s about to get real interesting, real fast. Then your upstream maintenance vendor tells you he doesn’t actually have the part in their local depot, but no worries, he’ll overnight Fedex it to you. Huh? Yo Jack, this is digital Sparta, we can’t wait that long! So we kicked him into the abyss! Long story short, battery discharged, 2nd controller took itself offline, performance dropped (it’s redundant, it wasn’t going offline but…), customers (that’s you dear reader) screamed as 2,151 virtual machines got SLOWER.
I’d been up about 22 hours already and had about a million dollars in payroll (we call these engineers) on a conference bridge when a coffee fueled caffeine surge jump started this one engineer’s brain and he gets the idea to pull the misbehaving controller totally out of the array, pull the power plugs on it, chant “bad controller! bad! bad! BAD!” over it for a full minute (this seems to be an amazingly effective method in such situations, bravo!), then put it back in. Next thing you know, the controller comes up, starts recharging the battery, goes fully operational, we overcome a few other obstacles then it rebalances the 1,200 disk load with controller #1 and voila!
Fast speeds, customers happy (you fickle bunch you!), cheers erupt from numerous countries (in several languages no less) on the conference bridge and the sun began to shine again. The depot part shows up the next day. Everyone grins like “really?” Lesson learned: I add the errant part to our normal onsite depot (which is already chock full of power supplies, hard disks, chassis, etc.) onsite vs. relying on the upstream vendor’s depot (fool me once, never twice). Later in this newsletter I explain all the crazy storage systems (codenamed N, C, Q, I) we have in the Cloud!
Meanwhile we’re back to playing around with new alien technology that will blow your mind; that’s the fun stuff. The adventure continues…
MORAL OF THE STORY, Straight from Digital Sparta’s hot gates: Technology will fail you. It’s a question of “when”, not “if”. The difference is that in the Cloud, it’s our problem (do YOU want I’d been up for 22 hours straight or pay that 
million a year in payroll for your own team of 24x7x365 storage experts?) dinCloud has the best team of multi-certified engineers plus “legos” to build a design that will deliver in the most demanding scenarios across public, private, colo, and hybrid clouds anywhere in the world at 110 datacenter locations.
“It doesn’t matter if you have thousands of virtual machines, petabytes of storage, wild disaster recovery and/or regulatory/security requirements: we have what you need.”
Our customers define us. We love you for it. We’re your Spartan tour guides. Someone asked me the other day in a Dilbert-like fashion what my “goal” as CTO was with all this wonderful technology. I responded with a Dilbert-like answer: “To suck less than the competition!” I am so inspiring sometimes! But.. So far, so good. On average we have far, far less issues than the majority of our competitors and an infrastructure that is 2- 10x faster too!
For more information on how dinCloud has the cloud solution you’re looking for, fill-out this form to schedule a meeting or a demo.
