On 3/25/2011 2:59 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
>
>> So no one develops new applications there?
>
> This is a large scale manufacturing execution system. You don't just go
> off and design an all new system based on the buzzwords d'jour, when
> your factories are dependent on it.
Pretty much everyone is in the same shape. But if you want to improve
things beyond what you get from updating hardware you have to make
changes sometime.
> Picture large factory floors with dozens of assembly lines each with
> 100s of pieces of computer controlled industrial equipment, all
> developed by different vendors, many 5-10 years old because THEY STILL
> WORK, talking proprietary protocols to middleware layers of data
> concentrators, which in turn talk to a cluster of core databases that
> track everything going on, and then a maze of back end reporting
> systems, shipping systems, data warehousing extractors, realtime
> production analysis (ok, thats part of reporting), statistical error
> analysis and trend prediction (feeds back into the reporting databases),
> etc, etc. There's also subsystems that monitor the overall process
> flow and manipulate production workloads and product mix, etc etc.
We redistribute commodity/stock market data - complexity isn't something
surprising, it is the norm.
> ALL this stuff would need replacing to work with a radically different
> core architecture.
Most of our stuff couldn't possibly work the way it did a few years ago
due to external changes in volume and scale. But each change had to be
non-disruptive and in nearly all cases new/old versions of a component
had to co-exist in the server farms transparently. But, I suppose we
think of the software as more of a core component of our business than a
factory might.
> The last major upgrade of the core database
> architecture took 5 years to deploy in parallel with the previous system
> after 5 years of development (and it maintained backwards compatability
> with the floor/middleware side of things).
So doesn't that mean you need to start the next design sooner vs later?
If the middleware layer handles most of the component interaction you
might have some freedom to make piecemeal changes. On the other hand,
distributed database technology is still evolving rapidly so if you
aren't running into scaling problems waiting might be a good idea.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com