We all have appliances, right? Teapots and toasters and microwaves and automatic coffee machines, etc. They’re all appliances. So are clock radios, electric razors, heaters and fans.
They’re appliances.
VTLs, SANs and NASs are not appliances, despite what any vendor would try to tell you. As soon as you’ve got an OS + software layer, you’re moving beyond “appliance” into “black box”. Or maybe we’re talking the difference between an appliance and an Appliance. If a vendor wants to tell you otherwise, they’re not telling you the whole story.
There’s a simple test on whether you’re being sold an appliance, or an Appliance – a simple yes/no question:
Is there a training course for the unit or an instruction manual with more than 1 page of instructions per language?
If the answer is “no”, then congratulations, you’ve got an appliance; if the answer is yes, then despite whatever your vendor wants to tell you, you’ve got an Appliance.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with having an Appliance within your organisation, and in fact I’d suggest that frequently they add a lot of value. VTLs, SANs and NASs, to use the example I previously provided, are all capable of greatly extending the storage and data protection options within your environment and should of course be considered in many architectures.
Knowing that they’re Appliances rather than appliances though means that you can treat them appropriately. I personally don’t care about backing up my toaster, or keeping a close eye on the logs from my microwave. As the appliance complexity increases, I pay more attention – so for instance the most critical appliance in my home is arguably the automatic espresso machine, and since it has blinking lights that can tell me whether I’m able to get a cup of coffee from it or not, I pay attention to it.
Extending this process, when you move from having appliances in your organisation to having Appliances, it’s critical that they are treated as full blown systems that require the same level of support, administration and consideration when it comes to problem resolution. Or another way to consider it, from a support perspective – if there’s an error happening in your environment, don’t ignore the “black boxes” when it comes to problem diagnosis. This means being aware of at least the following:
- How to view basic status;
- How to extract logs;
- Any caveats to reading logs (e.g., are they time/date stamped using a different GMT offset to your environment?);
- How to review the logs;
- How to escalate requests to the Appliance vendor.
Once you’ve been working with Appliances for a while, all of these start to come naturally. The big trick for beginners in the Appliance realm though is to ignore the “black box” you’ve been sold and instead be aware of the components and how to access the diagnostic information for the unit. If you can’t, you’ve created a “black hole” – and that’s not something you’ll get a lot of satisfaction from.