Hi Folks,
Today hasn't been the best one of my career in IT.
I've been a contractor for a major utility company for a number of years, on a number of seperate IT contracts mostly Unix. The company had 10 different flavours of unix and multiple different varsions of most of them.
At the time of my arrival they had;
SunOS (The old one) Sun SPARC
Solaris Sun SPARC
OSF1 DEC ALPHA
Dynix (SVR3) Fujitsu RISC
DGUX (SVR4) DG M88000 & X86
HPUX HP PA RISC
SCO SCO X86
AIX IBM Power 5
OS/x Pyramid RISC
DC/OSx Pyramid MISC
We experimented with some versions of Linux and implemented some versions, these went into production on IBM X235 and X245 Servers using Suse 7.3 and 8.3.
In the intervening years we have gone through E10K, F12K, F15K, we had P590, P690 and now P7XX (I no longer am on the AIX team), on the Solaris side we have M Series and T Series - I even got to play with a Sun AT7280 Series server.
Gradually the different flavours of Unix have gone, we are down to AIX, Solaris and Linux now. We have massively upgraded our kit to Power7 and M Series Sparc for grunt, we have V-MAX, DMX and Clariion disk back end we have one system with 118 CPU's, 1.7Tb of Memory and Several tens of Tb of disk but it's not as much fun as it used to be.
Almost all our applications have been virtualised, the recovery time for any problem is minimal - a recent Disaster Rehearsal showed that it onlt took minutes to recover a 3Tb database and implement it on a new server. But we seem to be bogged down in process, we generate thousands more reports, everything takes twice as long as expected and our principal customer still thinks that we provide a poor service because they are doing ten times as much as they were ten years ago.
And just a few minutes ago when I logged into my Oracle acount, they wanted to give me a free copy of Cloud Architecture for Dummies! That was the final straw for today - going home! Hope the data center catches fire!!!!!