The Illusion of Control – A tragic flat spin over the Atlantic Ocean

HPE

HPE JAN 21 - 3

Happy, Happy New Year. Hopefully your new year is off to a good start. Except for some of you, I see in the news that it is not.

One of my favorite authors of all times is Dr. Theodor Geisl. He was prolific. I have read and re-read his books for decades. I have highly recommended them to adults and children. Some of his books are inspiring. I have read from and quoted them at graduation ceremonies. Celebrities and politicians read his books on prime time television. Some of his books are good for health. There have been things in his books that I have wondered about for decades, only to see the wisdom in them play out before my eyes. I would highly recommend them to anybody.

One of my favorite books of Geisl’s is “I am NOT going to get up today.” This book tells how a young boy decides he is not going to get out of bed today. No matter what anybody else does! No consideration for any incentives that people place in front of him. Regardless of the peer or community pressure, he is staying in bed. You see, he has perfect control over his situation.

I am a control freak. I got that way when I went into IT and then sales brought it to a whole new level. One of my favorite sayings is, “I am paid to be paranoid.” Why? Because I am in constant competition with other company’s sales reps. I am in competition with the clock. I am in competition for budget, for mindshare.

The reality is nobody has perfect control. For that matter, nobody has control. We try to control the few things that we can. 2020 was a huge lesson. All contingency plans went out the window and new ones were developed. 2020 taught us to have contingency plans for our contingency plans. 2021 taught us that even those plans are not enough, we need control.

So what is there to control? Do a search on 2020 IT outages. Take a look at who sustained the outage and why. Now think about a being a customer on those platforms. The CEO of a partner to the company of one of these outages summarized it like this, “Customers across the U.S. lost access to their environments, their status screens and consoles, and they had “no sense of what was happening.” “It affected everything,” he said. “The whole environment was down. The network operations team adjusted routing policies to fix an issue introduced by a 3rd party provider and this resolved the incident.” I liken this to the commercial airline pilots flying from South America to Europe whose plane went into a flat spin over the Atlantic. The pilots had no data there was no airflow over the wings. They had no data to try to make a corrective action so they and their 300 plus passengers plunged to their deaths. What a hopeless feeling. What a tragedy.

If you are the CIO or a Senior Director of your company, I would like you to ask yourself this question. Do I truly know who all the suppliers to my suppliers are? How trustworthy are they? How established are they? Many of these outages were caused by software updates by the third party to the third party. Some were caused because the platform could not scale as quickly as was needed. What a tragedy.

Not one of those outages was on a NonStop system. HPE stands behind our software distribution. We can scale, to 24000 cores with no downtime. Most of the dev environment you are looking is available on the NonStop. Why risk your mission critical environment to platforms that are not as mature or stable as a NonStop? I know why. The pricing is attractive. So is mine. Give me a call. And if you would like to watch this video you can always cut and paste this url into your favorite browser and feel free to share with your business colleagues and friends:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BPpum-FaH8&feature=youtu.be