Tuesday, 28 Apr 2009

Risk analysis

I’ve got a client who needs to get a critical production system upgraded. Frankly, the risks involved — and indeed the plans one prepares — don’t really change from site to site; but each event is still unique and takes careful investigation to make sure you’ve figured out all the interactions you need to look after.

Anyway, one of the pieces of this system is MQ (which, in case you’ve not heard of it, is a very widely adopted — if somewhat cumbersome and archaic [not to mention proprietary and commercial] — enterprise message queue platform; no, you’re not missing much, and yes, there are open source alternatives). So the other day I was quietly investigating the sequence involved in doing an upgrade of an existing MQ installation. Along the way I came across a forum posting by someone asking a similar question to what I had in mind:

Q: Is is possible to move directly from MQ V5.3 to V7.0???

ie, skipping MQ 6.0. A reasonable thing to ask (even if they did overdo the question marks); these things are not always obvious and sometimes you have to go through an intermediate step. An experienced individual quickly replied:

A: Yes.

Which was terrific. An enlightening answer; to the point, authoritative, direct, and concise. Very helpful. Well done, and much appreciated.

I was certainly well satisfied at that point, pleased to be able to benefit from the shared wisdom of the global village. Our erstwhile original poster, however, under the mistaken assumption that the internet is a place where you can go to get people to do your job for you for free, continued on with a degree of persistent sticktoitiveness that one can only admire:

Q: What kind of challenges do we need to face during this process??

The answer wasn’t long coming:

A: Overcoming any fear of reading the documentation.

:)

AfC

overcoming-fear, posted by Andrew Cowie in operations/enterprise at 2009-04-28T02:52:48Z

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