Pythian Group

Yesterday, I saw a Twitter post regarding the speaker evaluation results from SQL Rally 2011 in Orlando, FL last May. I was surprised to see that my session was in the top 3 best sessions of the conference. I dug up the Excel spreadsheet containing my session evaluation results and began to read. I found one comment very fascinating (the only evaluation where I got very low scores) as the response pertains to the speaker’s knowledge of the subject. The comment was: “copy and paste coder.” I’ve been doing this specific presentation for almost 5 years now with a few tweaks every once in a while based on feedback from attendees. Yes, I live and breathe disaster recovery as part of my day-to-day job. However, there are several reasons why I do not type nor write code during my presentations. Here are a few of them:

1. A presentation is a performance: Many will disagree with me on this, especially experts who believe that to demonstrate their expertise, they should be writing code and doing live demos during a presentation. Whenever I go up the stage to deliver a presentation, I always think about the attendee/audience. My goal is not to display my expertise nor to brag about what I can do that the audience could not. I always remember that my presentations are not about me, but about the audience. Which is why I do a lot of preparation prior to delivery – research, writing an appropriate storyline (you got it right – storyline), selecting the right demos, building test environments, writing demo scripts, rehearsing my presentation, etc. Yes, I rehearse my presentations and I say it out loud. I do the best that I can to make sure that the audience will be entertained, engaged, enlightened, educated and encouraged. If I’m doing a presentation on disaster recovery, I even plan out what type of disaster will I be simulating. Doing this will help me make sure that I don’t go beyond the time limit that was alloted for my session while covering all of the items that I intend to. I’d be very happy if the audience will walk out of my presentation with something that they will do when they get back to their regular routine. I keep in mind what Dr. Nick Morgan, one of America’s top communication theorist and coach, always say:”The only reason to give a speech is to change the world.” So, if you’ll be attending a presentation I’m delivering in the future, I’ll assure you that you won’t be disappointed.

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In my previous blog post, I talked about high availablity and disaster recovery (HADR) and how it is more than just the underlying technology that keeps the entire strategy intact. In this blog post, I’ll describe a few acronyms – sometimes called buzzwords – that are commonly referred to in HADR projects and implementations (I know I use them a lot when addressing questions regarding HADR.) These acronyms fall under the second P in my PPT for HADR – PROCESS. Every HADR project or implementation should first be able to define these acronyms well before they even purchase the hardware, software and technologies they intend to use. Let’s get going.
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Last week, I was at the NetApp office in North Sydney for the presentation on NetApp SnapManager for Oracle. It was good opportunity to learn more about NetApp snapshots while working on a project for one of our clients in Sydney. It was an especially interesting topic as I have some experience using Veritas Checkpoints (see my presentation on test systems refreshes), and it was interesting to see what’s different and new in the NetApp implementation. But I digress.

I learned that NetApp can provide access to the same LUNs via either Fiber-Channel (FC) or iSCSI. And this is when the interesting argument surfaced. Apparently, some companies aim to have the technology stack on their disaster-recovery site as different as possible from the primary production site. Their argument is that if one technology fails at the primary site (like FC to access storage), then the DR site using a different technology stack will more likely be unaffected.

Hrm . . .  I had never thought about this, and when I consider it now, it still doesn’t appeal to me. If I design a highly-available solution with a disaster-recovery site in place, one of my priorities would be to switch between the sites comfortably at any time. The more differences two sites have, the lower my comfort level is.

The only reason why I think some companies can “demand” having different storage technology stacks at production and DR is to justify a more convenient (a cheaper?) implementation.

Thoughts? Comments?