* A recipe for a heterogeneous disaster; a recipe for a really good frozen strawberry fruit salad
Listen up, kids – here’s a time-worn recipe for disaster. Remember, when you make it, freeze it well in an environmentally green data center or trouble will occur. If the result becomes too much for you, I’ve also got a recipe for a really good Frozen Strawberry Fruit Salad to ease away the pain.
* A heterogeneous disaster
Take:
1 monolithic EMC Symmetrix DMX storage array with 200TB of Fibre Channel disk
1 copy Oracle 10G
3 licenses to Microsoft SQL Server
6 instances of Microsoft Exchange
1 storage administrator
3 database administrators, who each want all the storage capacity they can get anytime they want it
200TB of Serial ATA disk
1 confused CIO, who heard that SMI-S really works
1 off-site disaster recovery center
1 midrange unified NAS array with 200TB of Serial ATA disk
1 NetApp NearStore
1 Hitachi TagmaStore
100 Windows hosts, 200 Solaris hosts, 1 mainframe connected with FICON, and a pinch of NetWare
Mix it all together and make it heterogeneous. Expect it to play well together. Put it in a data center that is already taxed with power and energy problems. Put in a different configuration 200 miles away and expect it to serve as your disaster recovery site. Then hermetically seal, freeze and give up any thoughts of making it work inexpensively and having it be managed by one storage guy.
If you don’t think you can accomplish this recipe challenge, then here’s another for you – courtesy of my mother and probably every one else’s mother – a really good frozen strawberry fruit salad.
* A really good frozen strawberry fruit salad
Take:
1 8 oz. package cream cheese
Three-quarter cup of sugar
1 20 oz. can crushed pineapple, drained
1 10 oz. package frozen strawberries with juice, partially thawed
1 8 oz. container frozen dessert topping
3 bananas, sliced
Soften cream cheese with a fork. Add sugar and mix.
Add pineapple, strawberries and frozen topping; mix well. Stir in bananas. Put in 9 x 13-inch pan and freeze for between six and eight hours. Cut into 3×4 inch squares.
Twist a slice of kiwi fruit on top of each piece to make it festive.
Enjoy.
See you more this New Year.
