July 15, 2005
Disaster Recovery
Disaster Recovery is a topic that's slowly creeping up the awareness scale in our community. Recently one of our academic customers had a test-run with their supplier and I was there for the Sybase part of recovering their Library Management Server. I arrived on site thinking "server room" so at first walked right past the trailers parked just outside the library.
I was quite impressed that between the supplier and their IT department they'd done an excellent job of recovering the Operating System configuration, file systems and raw disk slices for Sybase to use. A minor hiccup showed the importance of updating the disaster recovery information after database expansions, fortunately this was easily corrected as there was free space present on the disks. Next was the Sybase recovery, which started with putting back the master database. Fortunately save_master was running in the cron of this system so a quick recovery from /scratch/master was done, followed by patching up of broken devices and databases before a load. This turned out to be an interesting exercise as when you're at the system console, you don't have the luxury of being able to copy and paste, something I have got very used to lately. A better approach would be to have most of the recovery scripted and the script(s) placed in one of the areas of the system that will be recovered very early on.
I wonder how many of your institutes have a full disaster recovery plan in place? How many are working on one? Does it include your Library servers, PCs and terminals, etc?
Why not share your experiences in the Infrastructure Forums.
Posted by Ateeq Altaf at 04:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 15, 2005
Being Open
June 14th 2005 saw the launch of OpenSolaris. For those of you that don't know OpenSolaris is a development project based on the source code for the Solaris Operating System.
This is clearly an important part of Sun's strategy and the entry on Jonathan Schwartz Weblog is particularly telling. He says:
There have been a few moments in my career where I've really felt like taking a step back, and saying "I'm proud to have been a part of that."
Today is just one of those moments. This is one instance where a broad cross section of the industry, focused on by a few incredible participants, did something our kids will learn about years from now. Because in the pantheon of Internet history, this will have its own chapter.For me it merely reinforces my belief that open source software, open standards and community development projects are an essential part of our industry.
This is an area that I'm pleased to say Talis are starting to take seriously. With the recently announced Project Silkworm we are embracing initiatives such as Creative Commons and Open Standards. We are also encouraging participation from key players in the Open Source community.
Who knows, maybe in years to come Talis will have its own chapter.
Posted by jimprince at 10:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 06, 2005
TDN Database Analyser
The Talis Developer Network has a very useful new download.
Talis Database Analyser is a software utility that will report on the structure of your Talis database. Assuming you have Talis Alto installed you just point the software at your Alto DataSource.dat file and it documents all the tables, views, stored procedures and Talis datatypes from the selected database.
This is a genuinely useful tool for System Managers, IT Staff and Developers.
If you haven't already done so you can register for the Talis Developer Network here.
Posted by jimprince at 03:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
