Making the Most of Your Inverted Pyramid of Doom
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There is often talk of why the Inverted Pyramid of Doom (aka the IPOD or 3-2-1 Architecture) design pattern is reckless and bad in most cases. Let's look at how to make the best of your existing inverted pyramid now that you have decided to address your needs.
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Had to share this: after making a challenge on Reddit for a large thread of "pro-SAN at any cost" people and posting a challenge here on ML and providing a place for feedback on SMBITJ I've so far had no feedback at all (except for the one example that I knew that @hutchingsp had and I requested from him directly to share) to my request for anecdotes or information as to why an Inverted Pyramid of Doom would be acceptable in a small deployment where there was not enough scale to provide cost savings from the SAN.
After weeks, we finally got this one, solitary response representing the collecting IT knowledge and know how of the crowd espousing IPODs regardless of business need:
Peer-reviewed my behind… This post represents a complete and total spew of utter garbage. Really??? Emotional reactions to “the problem”?? “An IPOD”?? Even suggesting (though not “our best option” dumping all your brand new equipment and moving to a single host?? Please focus on removing your introspective nears and pathetic sarcasm to a minimum. You couldn’t smell the manure stink more had you forcefully shoved your head inside an elephants rear end…. Do the world of Actual IT Professionals a favor and take your biased disinformation to a place where no-one else can be poorly and deceitfully guided by it.
Sincerely,
– The World of Truth and ReasonThat's it. The "we get our advice from our salesman" crowd and "everyone else is doing it so it is okay for me to do it" fanboys literally came back with nothing but that? Could there be higher support or a better admission that the concept is wrong?
Sadly, this is the kind of unprofessional, emotionally-driven reactions we actually face. Sure most people are a bit more mature and a bit less emotional, this is probably someone who is fearing that they will get caught not having done their homework and letting a salesman do their job for them and got their company screwed and is now panicking and trying to discredit the idea by being belligerent - but the emotional reaction is very strong and this is important to remember. When we attack something like an IPOD.... we are not telling someone that they chose the wrong hard drive, we are often pointing out a mistake worth more than someone's job, often pointing out that a salesman was crooked and took them to the cleaners, that they didn't do due diligence. Mistakes like choosing an IPOD and wasting company money and putting them at risk (in most cases) is certainly the kind of reckless IT that could get someone fired. People really do fear that their bosses will read this kind of knowledge and question why decisions have been made and when emotions like this are what are driving IT, they are pretty unlikely to have viable answers (the salesman told me you wouldn't catch on or but my buddy at another company didn't get in trouble for this won't cut it.)
This is how we know that we are coming up with good solutions - people aren't just annoyed, they are angry and emotional. We've very clearly uncovered major issues in the industry and people are not just so angry that they lash out, but do so with zero attempt to even try to sound technical or professional and are so afraid of being found out that they will not even use their names or identify themselves in any way. Even the email address used privately was fake.
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Here is an example in the real world where an IPOD Failed, and had they dismantled the IPOD years before and gone down to a single server node, would never have had the failures that the IPOD did. While the people involved never had the chance to stop the IPOD being purchased, so the money would have been wasted no matter what, they could have taken the IPOD apart and only had a single server and would have been safer and more reliable.
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@scottalanmiller said in Making the Most of Your Inverted Pyramid of Doom:
Peer-reviewed my behind… This post represents a complete and total spew of utter garbage. Really??? Emotional reactions to “the problem”?? “An IPOD”?? Even suggesting (though not “our best option” dumping all your brand new equipment and moving to a single host?? Please focus on removing your introspective nears and pathetic sarcasm to a minimum. You couldn’t smell the manure stink more had you forcefully shoved your head inside an elephants rear end…. Do the world of Actual IT Professionals a favor and take your biased disinformation to a place where no-one else can be poorly and deceitfully guided by it.
Sincerely,
– The World of Truth and ReasonEmotional reactions such as this guys whole post... nothing but emotion, zero rationale.
It sounds like someone wasted a million dollars of company money and is trying discredit reality.
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@Obsolesce said in Making the Most of Your Inverted Pyramid of Doom:
@scottalanmiller said in Making the Most of Your Inverted Pyramid of Doom:
Peer-reviewed my behind… This post represents a complete and total spew of utter garbage. Really??? Emotional reactions to “the problem”?? “An IPOD”?? Even suggesting (though not “our best option” dumping all your brand new equipment and moving to a single host?? Please focus on removing your introspective nears and pathetic sarcasm to a minimum. You couldn’t smell the manure stink more had you forcefully shoved your head inside an elephants rear end…. Do the world of Actual IT Professionals a favor and take your biased disinformation to a place where no-one else can be poorly and deceitfully guided by it.
Sincerely,
– The World of Truth and ReasonEmotional reactions such as this guys whole post... nothing but emotion, zero rationale.
It sounds like someone wasted a million dollars of company money and is trying discredit reality.
It's called "reverse rationalization" in psychology context. Humans want to believe that we are rational, logical creatures. But most of our decisions are emotionally based and made faster than we can rationalize them. Then, when our decisions are questioned, we go back and our brains try to remember there being logic that we used to make the decision. If there is logic, we recall that logic. When there isn't logic, our brain freaks out and either constructs false logic to make it seem rational, but that often makes it seem even more crazy to outsiders looking at us spouting gibberish. And if our own brains realize the gibberish or this is pointed out, it can actually trigger the fight or flight response when all logic shuts down and we just panic.
