So this is going to start by comparing systems to a growing child’s shoes. The first thing you search for when shoe shopping is something that you like/suits your needs. For example, you would not buy flip flops for hiking. You also should not buy $100 shoes when you only had $50 to spend on them. The same things apply to the servers and hardware needed for the infrastructure of the systems.  You have to work within a budget when buying servers, computers, network hardware. In most cases most bang for the buck is sought after. Some brands that may not be liked of viewed as high quality and are avoided in the selection process. There are some nice to haves like binky shoes or quad Ethernet ports that probably are not needed.

The next comparison to be made is when you buy a new pair of shoes for a child you need to allow room for growth. When buying network hardware, it is good practice to try to enough space to grow. Ideally the hardware would before be replaced before it can no longer keep up with the load that is pushed on the system. Then again sometimes the systems grows much faster than expected and this is both a good and a bad thing. The bad part being that the system fails to keep up with the need and the good part being that you are doing enough business to need to upgrade. There is usually an expected end of life for hardware.

Going back to the right shoe for the occasion, you need to have the right hardware for the job. Certain types of servers are need for web traffic and certain server for databases and firewalls are different as well. A database server should have a good processor set up, a lot of storage with variation in the speeds of the drives.  An SSD is good for the C drive but not necessarily needed for the storage as SSD’s rise exponentially in price as storage goes up.

The last comparison to be made is recognizing with the kids foot herts because their shoe is too small for their foot. In the systems world, there are issues that are glaring and some that are not. Some of the glaring issues are the database getting locked up on queries being ran. A few of the things that could cause this are too many requests on certain tables, databases or even on the server itself. Sometimes, a database gets used so much, that it needs its own server. In the instance of a webserver, if the database server has been ruled out as the blocker, sometimes the load needs to be split between multiple web servers or there is an underlying issue or issues with the webserver. In the end, there should always be an expectation that hardware will need to be replaced because of upgrade, hardware failure or plain expansion.

Before I go over the engine, I’m going to explain the other parts so that you have an idea of what our engine powers. So when you look at a car the first thing that you see is the paint, rims and accents of the car. This is the wonderful product of our design team. They ensure that our users have the Ultimate user experience by designing things with the user in mind. Next is the inside of the car, all the bells and whistles! This consist of our queries and ColdFusion coding that are not really outward facing. This part is the product of a variety of teams. All of these ensure the reports, processes and data gathering are done properly. Humanatic would be the person driving the car. You don’t get from point A to point B without driving. All of our call reviews go through a system maintained by a small amount of people. The maintenance of the car is important here as well. Here our Cases team goes through anything that is going wrong and meticulously hunts it down and fixes the bells and whistles. This is the heart of the Hacker Farm. I say this because it is not the most glamorous job, but it allows people to focus on other issues and not to be pulled in a thousand directions. Now that you have an idea of the process, to the Engine. This is the part of the car that no one ever sees. Most people never see the engine or know all it does but expect it to work none the less. One last important team is the Projects team, which is in essence is our GPS. You, know Google maps because they keep us on the right path. They tell us the projects to do and keep them in flow
The engine of all of our reports, queries, processes and even our data gathering all comes from our hardware. This gets broken down into our servers, dialtag boxes, email systems, databases, system updates to name a few of the engine components. The integrity of the databases are an extremely important task that is done. Since we don’t have a DBA it comes down to the team leads and the Systems team to ensure that they are running smoothly. Our servers are monitored highly. It would be like have a thousand sensors in your engine telling you exactly what is going wrong. We get emails and have systems set up that tell us the load of the server, if and when it went down, the loads that it has had over a period of time. Even our email systems are monitored for anything that could pop up. High email flow, services that crash and block reports being sent out. Our server have hard drive failures, system updates and configurations that all have to be taken care of. The way a lot of systems are set up are that they have redundant drives to hold the system up until we can replace the drive.