* The IT odes of Thoreau
Here in New England we place great store in the writings of Henry David Thoreau, a famous IT manager of some years past. Today his writings rarely show up in computer science curriculums and infrequently appear on the reference shelves in most IT rooms. It is even a good bet that most of you are probably blissfully unaware that the very origin of the term “throughput” began in IT as “thoreauput.”
Still, those of us who do know Thoreau’s work still find it provides good guidance for many of our 21st century IT operations.
His wisdom touches on just about every aspect of IT. It begins with his first experiences as a junior level Java programmer (“I sought to know beans”). It admonishes us to respect those admins and tape handlers who must work into the early hours to make sure we keep to our backup windows and who must possess “the three o’clock in the morning courage.” He even includes guidance against being promoted into management (“Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes”).
Certainly however, his most important maxim is the one he gave us while managing storage at Walden: “Simplify, simplify.”
Costs associated with downtime were only one of many challenges that convinced him that a simplified infrastructure was what was called for. He understood even in those early days of IT that large managed environments were inherently complex, and he appreciated the need to move away from such complexity towards simpler interfaces and management schemes that showed greater economy.
Nowhere of course was the challenge of complexity more apparent than when a need arose for problem resolution. Then as now, a complex mix of heterogeneous storage systems meant that with any problem the result was often a blizzard of trouble tickets rather than a single clear identification of the cause of the difficulty.
Thoreau quite naturally references many blizzards in Walden. Too bad for him that root cause analysis was in its infancy in those days, so Thoreau was only able to solve his incompatibility issues in those few cases where the cause of a problem provided very strong circumstantial evidence – as he put it, “as when you find a trout in milk.”
These days most of us hope for analysis tools that don’t require quite such pungent indicators, but the issue of identifying problems in complex scenarios remains with us. Our friends managing telecoms central offices have had sophisticated root cause analysis tools for over a decade now. Maybe soon it will be our turn.
Several years after Thoreau’s early work in IT we still struggle with many of the same issues as he did. Simplifying infrastructure as a step towards simplifying storage management is still a goal we are working towards. Let’s hope that the vendors can help us get there.
