On communication between techs and managers. #Rant!
Memo to management,
When your System Admin tells you the data copy will take 2-5 hours, IT WILL TAKE 2-5 hours! SHUT UP AND LEAVE THEM ALONE! Nothing you do is going to speed up the process.
For the rest of you, files take time to move. There are a lot of steps in the process of a file copy, the original must be read, checked for errors and then written in the new location. Easy and fast on the same computer. Not so fast when you are doing it over a network, or between sites, or across the internet.
We are an impatient group as IT professionals. We want it now, management wants it yesterday, but realistically 100 gigs of data, over a 10 meg link takes time to move. So in this scenario, you would be looking at 3 hours, if you were able to use full bandwidth with no errors. Now lets be realistic, you are in business, you are using your internet, so maybe you get about 25%, of the pipe to dedicate to the data move. 12 hours. Now consider errors in the transmission, lost packets, corrupt files that need to be checked and retransmitted, about 16-24 hours. Now, other things can happen, weather could knock out the power at one of the locations in which case, you would have an additional delay of X hours, plus X more hours until you notice and resume the transmission.
So the lesson is, tech's be honest with your management, over estimate your time to copy, and managers, believe your techs, not everything happens at the speed of light.
When your System Admin tells you the data copy will take 2-5 hours, IT WILL TAKE 2-5 hours! SHUT UP AND LEAVE THEM ALONE! Nothing you do is going to speed up the process.
For the rest of you, files take time to move. There are a lot of steps in the process of a file copy, the original must be read, checked for errors and then written in the new location. Easy and fast on the same computer. Not so fast when you are doing it over a network, or between sites, or across the internet.
We are an impatient group as IT professionals. We want it now, management wants it yesterday, but realistically 100 gigs of data, over a 10 meg link takes time to move. So in this scenario, you would be looking at 3 hours, if you were able to use full bandwidth with no errors. Now lets be realistic, you are in business, you are using your internet, so maybe you get about 25%, of the pipe to dedicate to the data move. 12 hours. Now consider errors in the transmission, lost packets, corrupt files that need to be checked and retransmitted, about 16-24 hours. Now, other things can happen, weather could knock out the power at one of the locations in which case, you would have an additional delay of X hours, plus X more hours until you notice and resume the transmission.
So the lesson is, tech's be honest with your management, over estimate your time to copy, and managers, believe your techs, not everything happens at the speed of light.
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