IT love

It was a clear spring evening and the data center was quietly calm. The ventilators were whirring about and mixing the hot air together. The lights were softly flickering and competing with each other, who represents the more important activity. The 2 disk controllers in the corner were managing their own tasks, just now and then they exchanged some agreeable data between each other. All of a sudden there was a spark flying over the heartbeat bus that the watch dog process also noticed. The IOPS grew, the latencies were growing and even the control system didn’t notice that there was something much more going on. The arousal through the interconnect cable expanded – and it was only a matter of time till something was going to happen. And it happened. The controllers, just for a moment, neglected their duty and a takeover happened. The tension lessened and the 2 disk controllers merged together. The loads increased to read/write, read/write… The ventilators turned faster and pulled hot air out of the system. The control system finally woke up and realized, what was going on. It quickly informed the system administrator about what was happening. But the controllers were still tightly merged into one whole entity. The processor activity quickly grew to 100%, the interconnect traffic was increasing fast. The block sizes grew fast. The 2 controllers heard footsteps in the hallway that were approaching fast. They knew that they didn’t have much time left, before they would be separated again. The lights in the room turned on and the red LED glowing on the front side, gave them both away. They felt a pain when the console was activated and they knew that everything was over. The administrator separated the 2 disk controllers through giveback. The following process created latency and artificially prolonged their merging time. But the process could not be stopped anymore. The ventilators calmed down, red lights turned into green lights, which represented the color that separated the 2 of them. They were separated and each doing their own tasks again. The room lights turned down slowly as well and the visitors left the data center. The equipment was alone; the servers quietly whispered and commented the whole happening. In another corner, the previous generations of disk controllers followed this event very quietly and with utmost interest. One of the controllers then sent a set of ticklish blocks through the interconnect cable...