acquisition update

[rone]

Adobe's systems infrastructure is a mess.  There's compartmentalization up the ass and they're running production applications on Sun Enterprise 450s (laypeople: imagine a minibar refrigerator on wheels full of hard drives, powered by a Pentium II).  The only trick will be to wear down their higher-level IT people and let them see the light, namely, We Do Things The Right Way And You Don't, So Give Us The Keys And Let Us Fucking Drive Already.  They run Oracle Calendar, and the gits actually want us to transition to it right away, only to transition back to Exchange Calendar once we're fully integrated.  We must be firm, because we're so far ahead of them in almost every aspect, it's not even funny.

Comments

[boutell.livejournal.com]

> wheels full of hard drives

Dude, that might improve random access seek performance!

[pootrootbeer.livejournal.com]

Ah yea, I recall the late 1990's, when Sun convinced all kinds of companies that the 450 was the end-all of server hardware.

They never break and they never need to be upgraded!

[fanf]

One of ours caught fire.

http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~fanf2/hermes/doc/misc/orange-fire/

[wisn.livejournal.com]

Wow. So what was Adobe spending their money on when Chizen was bragging about 90% profit margins on Photoshop five years ago??

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

According to my boss, they've been spending it on managers.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

At the risk of being slightly contrary...

Oracle calendar is the-product-formerly-known-as Steltor CorporateTime Server. I ran it back at the doomed startup of, um, doom (http://www.messageone.com/), and it's was a pretty sweet damn package. Substantially less flaky than Exchange 5.5 or 2000. (Okay, okay... narrower than the sky... shallower than the ocean... etc. Still.)

Of course, Oracle has now had 3-4 years in which to turn the product into crap and/or actually make it more expensive than Exchange.

Still, I'd recommend keeping an open mind about it.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Oh, i wouldn't mind keeping it open as an option. I merely object to the enforced double migration.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Oh, heh, true. That is dumb.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Ask them if they're using the remote service processor (an embedded bonus compute in the E450's) and if they have their own IP addresses.

If they do, port 42 may be your friend.

[ltempt.livejournal.com]

An E450 is a minibar full of spindles with 4 x Pentium II processors. I'd take an E450 over a lot of machines, and the only thing wrong with them was the bizarre lack of RSC (wtf? huh?)

On the other hand, they're old enough now to be asking exactly why they're still running critical shit in today's lease-obsessed world.

[dnereverri.livejournal.com]

I've been running a production system on a 450 since 1999; it's been rebooted maybe once every 8-9 months, usually because of a power failure or because the crappy tape drive died again, sometimes just because I decide it's about time for a reboot. It's in a room with poor temperature control, poor ventilation, lots of dust, and cockroaches, but -- apart from the tape drives -- it's never manifested a problem. So on the whole, I'd have to say they're pretty decent boxes. (You can argue about whether they're overpriced, of course, but they're good workhorses.)

Re Oracle Calendar -- IMHO it's a much better calendar than Exchange, as long as you don't buy into the bizarre thesis that using a single application for email and calendaring is inherently superior to using separate applications, regardless of the actual interface -- which, as near as I can tell, is the primary argument for Exchange/Outlook.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Do you still have the 450 under support? We don't have anything that runs on UltraSPARC-II under support. It's not worth it to us. Of course, there are still a few yutzes running important shit on old boxes, like the dude who bitched about his server not working, and it turns out it's an Ultra 60 running Solaris 8 and Perforce. We had to re-IP it, and Perforce needed to have its license updated with the new address before it would work, and the server HAD to get working right away, even though we've told him for months that we won't support it 24/7 until they spend the money on a new server, because it SO HAPPENS that this server hosts all — ALL — of the documentation for our products.

I think that i've effectively drunk the Exchange/Outlook Kool-aid because a) it works as advertised, and b) it's not my problem. The move from 5.5 (which was suckier) to 2k3 was seamless, and turning on Active Directory at that point was also a dream. It's almost enough to turn my Microsoft Hate Index down a couple of notches.

[dnereverri.livejournal.com]

Yep, we still have the 450 under support. We'll have enough problems if it develops a hardware problem, without having to worry about parts, too.

Can't stand Outlook myself. Something about the multicolumn interface confuses me; I could deal with two columns, but three just seems to conceal rather than reveal information, the way my mind works at least.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, me too, that's why i turned off all the columns except for name and subject.