Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Almost done with term...

I said "Merry Christmas" to someone for the first time tonight. Until tonight "Christmas" was one more project on a list of giant projects to do in December:

Study for IT Project Management Exam
Finish Editing IT Project Management Paper
Finalize 2009 IT Budget for Work
Cram for Accounting Exam
Christmas Shop
Remove Air Conditioning Unit From Window

This is the first year that I have bought almost everything online-although I don't generally enjoy shopping I enjoy buying Christmas gifts. I will visit craft bazaars and go to the Maul and visit bookshops to find trinkets and necessary objects for my loved ones. This year I haven't had the time to do so and that makes me sad. I had a horrible dream a few weeks ago in which I had showed up at my parents house with Nothing purchased for anyone for Christmas. In my dream my dad castigated me for spending all my time reading silly novels instead of getting things done.

It was a horrible dream and obviously it was all about my anxiety about not being able to do a proper job of Christmas shopping. But here's the thing-I haven't been spending all my time reading silly novels-I've spent all my time studying for Accounting and attending meetings for my IT Project Management class. While working full time.

Well, I thought, wasn't that the goal-to be an "engaged" (some would say slightly psychotic) MBA student? Apparently the opportunity cost for doing so includes Christmas Shopping. I am sad of that, but I can remember this and shop for presents for my loved ones some other time.

A year ago I had just gotten into the program. Now I am in the middle of it. It still scares me a bit (I have to take Statistics next term!) but even though it's going to suck for a while I don't think it's un-doable. Apparently flaky, literary, sci fi Cantabridgienne can handle Activity Based Costing and Work Breakdown Structures.

I am not happy about the fact that I have sub-standard gifts to give this year. But having finished one class I can look forward to actually baking cookies and listening to Christmas music and pulling my youngest nephew *away* from the Christmas tree. Of course I want to give good presents, but since I've started MBA school, I myself have put a premium on presence and getting to see my niece and nephews without worrying about a paper due or a problem set.

So, I'm sad that I had to shop online for Christmas gifts, but this is because of a temporary thing (MBA School). This temporary thing is good for Cantabridgienne in the long run and I think that my family understands that. Especially since even if I give less than stellar gifts I will be able to be there body and soul when we bake Christmas cookies, and watch the kiddos rip through all the presents, and eat Christmas dinner.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Storage Attached Network

Today I learned what a Storage Attached Network (SAN) is.

My employer is merging with another firm that provides the same services we do (Fee-Only Wealth Management). I can say this now publicly, since the press release has gone out. As part of this merger deal we need to find a way to share network resources with this other firm located in New Jersey. My job has been to work with a colleague in the New Jersey office to find an outsourced IT partner that would provide us with a way to do this.

We had a potential outsourced IT partner in the office today to present their proposal. They had e-mailed us the proposal previously and a component of it was, apparently, a Storage Attached Network. What is a Storage Attached Network?

I decided I should figure this out. I did online research. As far as I could tell, this was a box that housed a bunch of RAIDed drives and could hold a big honking amount of data. Great. But how is this different from any other network attached device (a NAS or a Snap or a plain ol’ server with lots of disk space?)

The outsourced IT partner had brought in an army of consultants from Dell to explain to us why we wanted a SAN. They had PowerPoint slides. They had jargon, all of which, they assured us we would be unable to understand (I love it when my vendors talk down to me!) but which they felt compelled to fling around. In the middle of their talk one of my colleagues mentioned that he used to work for EMC and, y’know, write software to deal with This Sort of Thing all the time. We think that might have shortened their talk a little and perhaps convinced them that we weren’t idiots.

They succeeded in explaining to me at least that a SAN was a very cool thing indeed, but they didn’t answer my fundamental question of what it was. And ultimately, as cool as the concept was, no one succeeded in convincing me or my colleagues why having one would help us with our main goal-being able to share network resources with the office in New Jersey.

I didn’t actually understand what an SAN was until later in the day when I wandered over to my colleague’s cubicle to ask him what he thought of the presentation. During our discussion he explained that SANs used to be wicked expensive and that no outfit smaller than American Airlines would be interested in one until (apparently) recently. “They don’t have Ethernet connectors. They have these funny looking things with light and fibers…” he said “Fiber optical connection?” I asked. “Exactly.” So that’s what one of these is. It’s a big honking network attached device that connects through fiber optics. Fiber is faster than Cat 6 (Ethernet) cable. That’s not a difficult concept to absorb. But somehow I hadn’t gotten it from Wikipedia’s article. The article did mention fiber networks, but it lead me to believe these were old school (from the 90s) and therefore I was unsure how relevant this information was in 2010.

The Dell guys, who talked at us for an hour, didn’t mention this. The outsourced IT provider didn’t mention this. But in a five minute conversation with my co-worker I figured out what the big deal was*.

What have I learned from this? Well it reinforces some of the happy teamwork memes I’ve been so busy absorbing at MBA school. Reading stuff on the Internet is not always enough. Sometimes you need an actual human, or, more importantly, a human who knows you and knows how to explain things to you to help you understand things.

*It also has other neat features which I gathered from the presentation, but those are mostly interesting from a disaster recovery point of view and don’t necessarily make it any more attractive than NASes and don’t explain why these things are so farking expensive.