I just heard from a DBA at my last gig who was keeping me in the loop about things I had done while I was there.
He said that they had to take away the 2 1TB LUNs I had them put on our DB server because they caused performance problems. The SAN guys warned us that having LUNs that big would hurt us and I guess they were right. Well, not really. This was the report I got back from the DBA, so not my words. When I grilled him about it, he did say that they had given us a single spindle that was 1TB for each of them instead of giving us several drives in the array.
So let me get this right… I asked for 1TB LUNs, and instead of doing it right you gave me a single drive and used it as justification for showing me you know more about disks than I do? I find that incredible.
So guys, yeah… you really have to be on top of your game and know your stuff so that when they do stuff like this you can call them on it. And I must admit that I’m not sure it would have crossed my mind to even check that it was a single spindle. Why would that even cross my mind? These are enterprise SAN guys… they know their way around and should definitely know better. What I didn’t realize was that they were into playing games. It just goes to show that you try so hard to be effective in some places and they just won’t let you.
“you try so hard to be effective in some places and they just won’t let you”
how very, very true. I could share a lot of similar stories as well. at the end of the day i want what is best for the end user, and sometimes that isn’t what is best for someone else. and people hate it when they have to support a “one-off” from their standards. hell, i know i hated having to support one-offs all the time, so i can understand that others feel the same way.
still, everyone has to work together. and playing games is not very professional. aren’t you glad you moved on?
Exactly Rockstar…they’ve proven to me a few times why I decided to leave. Sometimes you just really try and no matter what you do you can’t be effective in a shop.
I just left a place like that, it was infested with game playing, finger pointing, mismanagement, misinformation. I can only hope that karma will balance their behavior in the future. Me, I’m just glad to be out of there finally.
Unfortunately I carry with me the knowledge that highly technical work can always be misrepresented to others that do not have the background or the wherewithal to investigate what is said.
I hope to God not to ever have to work at a place like that again.
Let me first qualify my background. I am a CIO of a mid-western insurance company, having raised through the ranks as a developer with duties branching into hardware and database over the years and jobs. Although I have various dev and DB MS certifications, I have not worked as either a DBA or a network administrator and my certifications are dated (~10 yrs old). What is up-to-date is my management experience as I have been in IT for sixteen years, and the last eleven have been in various levels of IT management. Although I do not micromanage, I consider myself to be predominantly tactical and competently technical (jokes aside, I think my direct reports would agree). I first read about this blog post as referenced in an editorial on the SQLServerCentral.com daily email subscription, and followed the link here.
It seems to me that we are missing critical information about this situation. We do not know why the SAN Admin used a single disk. Was there a misunderstanding? Was it malicious? Was it due to a lack of knowledge? Was it due to budgetary or management constraints? Was the request passed down to a less knowledgeable worker? Any of these and perhaps others may be true. The questions that concern me are: “How are we going to fix it?”, and “How are we going to improve the situation for next time?”
My experience is that there is often a disconnect between Database and Networking departments. This is due to the fuzzy overlap in duties, divergent priorities, technical differences of opinion, differing knowledge sets, budget issues and an often introverted fear of confrontation leading to blunt resentment. We all know and acknowledge that this disconnect is not helpful to anyone. At times this dynamic may not be even-handed and you may have a one sided disconnect. However despite what you may think or feel about your own situation, my experience is that this is very rare.
Faced with this situation as a manager, I would ask the lead DBA and SAN Admin to evaluate technology options and determine and present to me, a single best-fit solution to which they both agree. I would coach them separately and together on the underlying issues with an emphasis on addressing the encompassing dysfunction. During this time, I would be evaluating both of them. As a self-proclaimed student of Steve McConnell, I understand the toxic effect of problem employees and my history with such is deliberate and decisive.
I have found that this approach to be successful in creating healthy working relationships between individuals and groups. Further, I have gotten feedback from staff members who have suffered through this approach to emerge more socially adept and appreciative of the process and their own growth. The real secret here is that working through this sort of challenging situation is an amazing career builder. Last year I heard the CIO of Progressive Insurance, Ray Voelker, say that “…the skills I used to get here [referring to his CIO position] are not the same skills I need to keep me here.” He’s speaking about soft skills and developing “fit” within a corporate environment and with peers versus his well honed technical skills. I would take this philosophy a step further. I think that developing and evolving soft skills is important at all levels for both the continued success of company you are in and for your own personal development. Difficult and painful? Absolutely.
Alternatively we could continue to perpetuate a stereotype.
Mike… thanks for that well thought-out comment. However, in this case we had been on a couple calls with EMC about this and even had their top engineers on the phone with us. I had been telling them for 2yrs that we could have LUNs larger than 68GB but my SAN guys kept saying that it was impossible w/o killing performance. Then EMC agreed with me and we all agreed that doing this wouldn’t be a huge issue as long as we did it right. This is a company with gazillions of dollars to throw at hardware and they have a HUGE warehouse… so money isn’t the issue. When all was said and done, the SAN guy decided he didn’t like the DBA showing him up in front of his main vendor so he put a single drive in there instead of the 20 we had agreed on. On both calls with EMC we all agreed that having plenty of disks was essential. So not only was there no miscommunication, there was no middleman. There were only 2 SAN guys and I submitted the request myself directly to them. I get that you’re trying to smooth things over and give alternative reasons why this happened, but I just don’t see much wiggle room in this case.
” Sometimes you just really try and no matter what you do you can’t be effective in a shop.” Yes indeed. Also to remember in most shops they’d rather blame the person who left than someone who si still around.
There are advantages to being a DBA in a small shop. Nobody can sabotage my work.
Oh, so TOTALLY agreed.
Sean,
Thanks for elaborating on this situation. Is the issue still being discussed at the company or did the storage issue get resolved in another way? I am reminded of an old saying, “if there is a bag of [expletive removed] hanging from a flag pole, someone put it there.” From what you have written, it seems to me that management has some work to do. They really ought to be all over this audacious and unprofessional behavior. I guarantee that this is not the only problems wrought by these folks and leaving them unchecked is damaging to the company. Completely unacceptable.