Hi-Tech Series : Five Nines is for Wimps

Five Nines refers to 99.999% uptime for computers. Uptime is an Industry Standard in the Hi-Tech world that measures the time that a computer system runs between unscheduled down time. Scheduled down times are called maintenance windows while any unscheduled down time is considered an Outage. Two Nines allows for 3 days downtime a year, while Three Nines equals 8 hours, Four Nines is 50 minutes and Five Nines means only 5 minutes downtime per year. Anything more than that is a joke because you can't really measure 5 seconds per year which would eqal Six Nines or 99.9999%.

Most companies are happy to have 99% uptime but some have spent large amounts of time and money in the quest to get to 99.9% and so on in search the holy grail of uptime the infamous five nines: 99.999%. Everyone agrees it would be pointless to go any further. But not my new Boss, oh no, his first remark in the first meeting was: "Five Nines is for Wimps, we are going for 100%." He might as well have said 111% since it is well known you can't get there without spending more than we can afford.

Every new Boss has to make noise like a genius and they always start out with an "All Hands" meeting so they can lay out their agenda. The last new boss was going to make his mark by getting everyone a new laptop. He had the right idea but the wrong brand, we had to switch back to Lenovo after HP couldn't support our needs. HP is better for servers but Lenovo is best for laptops. The boss before that made an equally epic failure when he insisted on upgrading the company Windows version. Once again the right idea but the wrong version; too bad he chose Vista. That was his first and last mistake.

Then there was the Boss who demanded there shall be “No simple outages”. It was true we had suffered a series of avoidable breakdowns but we all knew he should be careful what he wished for and sure enough we stopped all the simple breakdowns and started on the big complicated outages. There was no going back after that and we soon had another new Boss.

This process has been going on all the way back to the Y2k panic at the turn of the Millennium. As soon as things settled down there was a move to switch to linux which we did do in spite of the complaints and protests from the existing unix departments. That new Boss was promoted to Vice President and everyone agreed he was brilliant. Later on that same Boss decided we should get rid of Windows which we did not do in spite of years spent wasting time and money on the effort. He is no longer considered brilliant or Boss.

I'm looking forward to the arrival of the next new Boss because I know it will continue a long standing tradition of starting out with some hair brain scheme that is bound to exasperate and entertain us at the same time.

1960’s : Rich Kid Poor Kid

In PE Class we all had to line up in front of the bleachers for roll call and the kid next to me was named Hal Rowland and next to him was a fellow named Richard Poor so Hal always had to make a joke that he would never get ahead in life because he "was stuck between rich and poor". Every single day he had to bring it up and Richard seemed to dislike it more than I even though the ultimate irony was that the Poor’s did have more money than the Rich’s.

Hal's family was infamous for owning the cow that wandered onto the Highway and caused a terrible car crash that killed a married couple late one night. The victim's relatives sued for damages but the Open Range law said the drivers were liable and they even had to pay for the dead livestock. Talk about adding insult to injury, that made for some juicy gossip and even qualified as big news but it was an awful small town.

That same stretch of road also later claimed the life of Kim Westlake when his car hit some black ice on the way to a track meet early one morning. Kim was my first friend after we moved away from the Lake and he was the guy who showed me around Janesville school where I got to know Hal and it was Kim who first introduced us to Steve Blankenship. Steve was the one who’s Dad had a little farm near the big old empty farmhouse where we got caught shooting owls in the rafters of the barn out back and we all had to run for safety at Steve’s place but his Dad found us and made us go back, apologize and clean the barn and for the rest of the day.

The next year we weren't so lucky when we got nailed for throwing snowballs at cars from the top of the log pile at the mill and this time we had to face our parents at the police station and there were serious consequences, we had to haul hay for two days as punishment. That same Officer pulled us over again a year later and this time he had us red handed in the form of poached ducks, poached in the out of season and no license sense not the cooking poached. This time the punishment was hauling Christmas trees for the landowner and it was two full weekends of freezing cold and brutal work.

We were so sore and tired from our various chain-gang jobs we went home and watched TV where we caught the latest episodes of whatever was on which somehow seemed to ease the pain along with a hot meal and an even hotter bath. Years later there was the original TV series called Roots which spawned a bunch of copycat spinoff series and one of them was called Rich Man Poor Man. To this day any time I see or hear any reference to any of those shows it always reminds me of Hal Rowland who had to stand for roll-call between Poor Rich and Rich Poor.

Passenger Trains and Pigeons

The poor Passenger Train is almost extinct just like its namesake the Passenger Pigeon. They were both once found in large numbers and then suddenly disappeared. Sure there are some local passenger transit systems for a few well-to-do municipalities but that is the exception and not the rule as all the rest of the cities are stuck with busses or less. For long distance train travel there is only Amtrak and that ain’t much compared to the rest of the world.

The last Passenger Pigeon was a famous bird named Martha who lived and died at the Cincinnati zoo in the year 1914. The decline of the species was dramatic, from billions to none in less than 50 years. The astonishing thing is how many there were when they first started to save them, but still not enough to succeed. You would think having just two birds would be enough to start over again but for some reason there has to be a large number to support the minimum amount to qualify as a sustainable flock. The Passenger Train went through a similar experience over the last 50 years of the 20th Century. By 1950 the number of cars, airplanes and buses carrying passengers had finally equaled the Railroad’s number. It seemed like a fair fight at the time, but it was already too late and the fight was all but over for the poor Passenger Train because it was just not profitable to ship humans compared to the money made by shipping coal, lumber, autos, etc...

By 1970 the Government had to step in and force the railroads to keep the Passenger Train alive in a minimal form with federal subsidy. None of the State Governments cared enough to subsidize and the Carriers had no interest in human cargo so it was only the Federal Government who could save the day. But instead of taking over and making it profitable they put it on a starvation diet of minimal help and left the industry to whither away on life support. Meanwhile Germany and Japan take turns setting new high speed records on their new Passenger Trains and even third world countries spend more on this than America. Canada has one of the all time greatest RR passenger system that is complimented by fully funded local rail passenger solutions. Vancouver has sky trains running by two’s in all directions.

When I first worked on the Railroad there were always special trains for the Big Shots to ride around and inspect the lines and then over the years that train got shorter and shorter until finally it was just a car or two tagged on the end of a regular train. By the time I left the practice fell out of fashion completely as one generation retired and was replaced by the next who would prefer to fly. And if the Big Shots won’t even use their own road for transportation then it really must be dead. Or maybe we just need a new generation of old school kids who are willing to ride a Passenger Train instead of flying.

Dog Food Shopping

If you Google on “dogfooding” you can find out about one of the concepts in Hi-Tech Industry called the Dog Food effect. The idea is that you have to use your own products so you can tell your customers that you know what they are going through because you eat your own dog food, so to speak. The idea is you should be familiar with your own product, something like an updated version of“Practice What You Preach”.

I first heard of this concept when Microsoft was found to be running linux servers and they had to promise to stop the same way Intel can’t run any computers with AMD chips and the Pepsi delivery man can’t be caught drinking Coke. It makes sense up to a point and then it starts to hurt more than it’s worth and people end up cheating to sneak their i-Pad in the door. It’s good to shop local when you can but it’s still OK to go Mall once in a while.

Another related idea is to go “Shopping” for your own product to experience what your users have to go through when they shop for your stuff. When I was taking support calls the shopping amounted to our bosses calling in to us as if they were customers to see how we handled their complaints.

I remember one of these incidents when I was taking support calls for Intel modems where the customer gave the standard complaint about the modems being hard to use and I gave the standard response about having to make system configuration changes and then the guy got mad. I kept my cool but he was angry and demanded a picture of my boss. It seemed like an unusual request but I said I would make the report and then he asked for a picture of the boss with his dog and that was the moment when I should have recognized the joke but they could have kept going asking for pictures of the cat and the pet bird and the even the dentist and I would have kept going along with the joke all day long.

The same concept works with your competitors in the business world where you want to go buy their product and then call their tech support. You should know the look and feel of the other products in your space so you can honestly point out the differences. Similarly you should use equipment from the company you are trying to sell to, we found out the hard way when HP told us we would get no more business until our Sales department switched from IBM to HP laptops. They didn’t like us going to their building with the competitors laptops.

The whole concept of having to eat your own dog food reminds me of the free trade concept of “Buy American” where it sounds alot easier than it is to actually do in reality. My company tries to buy products with our chips but it is impossible to operate with only our own stuff. Besides, I tried eating the dog food when I was a kid and while it wasn’t that bad, I still wouldn’t recommend it as the only diet option.