BUMBLESTUMP MISSOURI
MAC Twain
A local company celebrated the 7th anniversary of joining two critical data centers with its IT staff this week. For 7 years, the data centers have been connected using a bleeding edge technique their consultation firm calls “Distended VLANs” which allows communication between applications at each site. Getting there wasn’t easy. Veteran network engineer Treyce Rowt had slight reservations when the company first discussed the idea. “They are out of their f******* mind. I told them to just make the app team rewrite the entire shitty portfolio of services and of course they told us it’s a network problem to solve. They can go straight to hell” Rowt told JFI.
To overcome these challenges, the company brought in well-known consulting firm, Tricher, Khohlisa and Twyllo. Principal network architect for TKT, Greg Tricher explained the strategy. “This is exactly how we connected the data centers for Penske, inc. I spent years working on that project and it’s still an ongoing effort. Creating the distended VLANs isn’t easy and takes a lot of care, and hours.” Tricher continued. “We have to create these highly technical electronic tags - called virtual local area network tags. They also have a highly technical number associated with the technology, but it’s far too complex to go into with a layperson.” [EDITOR’S NOTE: The technology is known as 802.1q tagging. When asked about the scalability, Mr. Tritcher replied “Look, it’s been there seven years now. We’ve only had 31 outages in that time, well below the threshold for calling this unsuccessful. We’re not sure why the in house engineer was so upset, he still goes on and on about a tree spanning too much and loops or something. Every time we have a minor blip that interrupts all data center services for a few hours he sends some nasty email and says he won’t touch it. He wants to do some kind of voodoo with opening shorter paths or some nonsense. I’ve got my Network+, what’s he have? He should be helping us, really. We shouldn’t be expected to drop everything every time there is a minor error with the distended VLANs”.
When confronted about the emails, Mr. Rowt simply shrugs. “I’m not touching it. They locked in some 15 year contract with those jokers for anything outside of the buildings and whenever I want to get outta here for a day off, I just bridge a host. They disabled spanning tree because they didn’t understand it. I take the day off while they run about like ants in the rain. Then I email an animated gif of Steven Colbert pointing at an ‘I told you so’ sign. TKT folks also run the mail server off of their “cloud ready service” which lives on their residential DSL line at their office, so like 80% of the email comes days later. Honestly, I don’t understand how we’re still in business.”