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Showing posts from March, 2013

Your Customer's pain is not always yours

Or, the one and the many The inspiration for this post was a discussion with Q&A folks about how Crowbar should behave when failures are encountered while configuring  the storage subsystem on a node. Well, that and a binge of reading and listening to folks talking about Lean Startups and the importance of solving real customer issues. The Q&A engineer was adamant, that on a server with 24 drives, Crowbar should be just ignoring a single failed drive, and just use the other 23. For the use case he was trying to solve, this might make sense. He had limited resources (only a handful of servers), and needed to quickly turn up a cluster. The fact that Crowbar flagged the server with the bad disk as having a problem, and refused to use it was nothing but annoyance to him. Crowbar was designed to enable DevOps operations at very large scale. In a recent customer install (more about it in another post, i hope), the customer purchased 5 racks of servers, rather than 5 servers,