photo Celestine Chua
“Do you think the great Skeeve has nothing to do with his time but guard your borders? Do you want to tie up your high-cost magician doing the job a low-cost soldier could do?” – Aahz, MYTH Conceptions by Robert Asprin
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The book The Phoenix Project is the story of sorting out a company’s development and IT problems. In the book there is a character Brent. Brent is the go to IT guy who can fix things no one else can, like broken databases. Brent is also the bottleneck for required deliverables to move the company’s Phoenix Project forward. The Phoenix project is a make or break project. Either the Phoenix project succeeds and the company succeeds or it fails and the company goes down.
For the project to move forward there are very crucial deliverables, such as environment builds for QA and development. Without these deliverables the project gets blocked.
Brent is the gating factor on these deliverables and therefore the entire project.
Unfortunately Brent is used for all sorts of tasks. He’s like the go to guy for everyone. Everyone’s requests turn into unscheduled interruptions and all these unscheduled interruptions cause delays in Brent delivering the crucial project deliverables for the Phoenix project.
Part of the book is how this crucial resource and bottleneck, Brent, is optimized. A clear first step of course is to take anything off his plate that someone else can do. Unfortunately much of what Brent can do, only Brent can do. One solution is to get Brent to train other people to do what he can do. Couple of problems with that. One, Brent often doesn’t know how he accomplishes some of the things he does (or so he says) and two, he doesn’t have time to train others because of the enormous amount of backlog and pressures to get the Phoenix project moving forward.
Now my question is this: if there is a huge, complex, time consuming task that only Brent can do, would you ever make Brent do it when there is an automated, self service solution that does a better job than Brent and can do it faster and be run by anyone?!
Of course not ! Right ?!
Well, wrong. It’s happening all the time. Companies are relying on expert DBAs to copy and clone massive databases over and over again.
DBAs are generally the most expensive resource in the IT department and often the hardest to justify because the business just doesn’t get what the DBAs do, but DBAs are crucial and foundational to companies. The business on the other hand only knows that it wants this data now and if the DBAs can’t give it to them then the IT department must be broken.
Speaking to companies like RBS, they said that DBA teams spend up to 50% of their time making database copies. Macys said their DBAs spend 4,000 hours a year making database copies.
But guess what. All that can be eliminated with database virtualization. Macys went from manual copying to database virtualization and reduced that 4,000 hours of expert DBA time down to 8 hours of Junior DBA time.
photo Steve Jurvetson
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