Technology and Transhumanism
Friday, February 23, 2007
Office Transit Day
Today, the company I work for (Leads360, read the CEO Jeff Solomon's blog) is moving from our office in Inglewood, CA to a new office in L.A. proper - practically Hollywood. Of personal benefit, the office is approximately 2.2 miles from my apartment - close enough to bike!
So I sit here in my cubicle ... yay... with a mug of champurado, reading support inbox emails. We have these snazzy Cisco VOIP phones that are supposedly connection-independent. Our office backbone is a T1 line, and our servers and data are all remotely hosted. One of the main contingent factors of the move to the new office is - if we don't have the internet connection up and ready by the end of the day, we can't move.
Our business depends almost entirely on the net. Our phones wouldn't work. We couldn't manage the system, read client emails, change settings, check logs, update code... anything. If the net goes down, we might as well load up Halo and start deathmatching. This just happened earlier when the network had to go down for a hardware change.
Scale up an internet outage- how many businesses are this dependent on the web? Even a few minutes lapse in service can cost a mortgage broker 'theoretical' tens of thousands of dollars. A local business losing connection can cause serious problems, but a citywide or global outage would cause work to grind to a standstill, and the potential loss of millions and millions of dollars. Ever been to Home Depot or the grocery store when the computers are down? Lines get longer and longer, and employees dependent on computers and connectivity fuddle helplessly through restart procedures. Crude, handwritten signs stuck to credit card readers proclaim "The System is Down, Sorry!"
Considering the Internet was originally a project to permit information flow even if one part of the network was damaged or destroyed, it's interesting to see the effect something like a power outage or DNS server failure can have. In business or information terms, a datacenter going down is is virtually identical to a being hit with a nuke.
The good news - there's always Halo on the LAN.
So I sit here in my cubicle ... yay... with a mug of champurado, reading support inbox emails. We have these snazzy Cisco VOIP phones that are supposedly connection-independent. Our office backbone is a T1 line, and our servers and data are all remotely hosted. One of the main contingent factors of the move to the new office is - if we don't have the internet connection up and ready by the end of the day, we can't move.
Our business depends almost entirely on the net. Our phones wouldn't work. We couldn't manage the system, read client emails, change settings, check logs, update code... anything. If the net goes down, we might as well load up Halo and start deathmatching. This just happened earlier when the network had to go down for a hardware change.
Scale up an internet outage- how many businesses are this dependent on the web? Even a few minutes lapse in service can cost a mortgage broker 'theoretical' tens of thousands of dollars. A local business losing connection can cause serious problems, but a citywide or global outage would cause work to grind to a standstill, and the potential loss of millions and millions of dollars. Ever been to Home Depot or the grocery store when the computers are down? Lines get longer and longer, and employees dependent on computers and connectivity fuddle helplessly through restart procedures. Crude, handwritten signs stuck to credit card readers proclaim "The System is Down, Sorry!"
Considering the Internet was originally a project to permit information flow even if one part of the network was damaged or destroyed, it's interesting to see the effect something like a power outage or DNS server failure can have. In business or information terms, a datacenter going down is is virtually identical to a being hit with a nuke.
The good news - there's always Halo on the LAN.
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