Reliability and how to upgrade a demo during a trade show
I was in Chicago this week at a trade show. We had our cool demo running on a table for people to see and play with. It’s a stack of 5 AOpen computers hooked into a linksys router. I run Tomcat on my laptop and then run a couple apps that I got from other tech reps. One is what we call the "Dependability Demo" and its a Java Swing app that sends a bunch of transactions into the fabric that is running on the boxes. I’m currently using Suse 10.2 linux for the OS on the boxes. We always ask the people watching to come up and unplug an ethernet cable or a power cord from any of the boxes. Then the Swing app display shows that some transactions are hung in various states. As we are explaining what happened the fabric figures out what just happened and resubmits the the tasks that did not complete to different workers with the same state that existed before the cord was unplugged. The transactions complete and the rest of the app just keeps working. People really like that, they get the concept when they see the software do its job. Then they also know we aren’t vaporware.
While I was at the show, we decided to change our ethernet cables. On the first day we had 6-inch cables that were just too short to unplug easily because they were stretched so tight between the router and the machines. So I had someone pick me up some 3-foot cables and bring them to the booth. Then with the demo still running, I just started unplugging things and replacing cables. Half way through I remarked that someone should be video taping it because I was taking down the entire network and taking machines offline without caring one bit about the application that was running. The demo was happily completing all the tasks. It was a good example of how IT management could change if someone employed an Appistry fabric on their mission critical apps. How many times have you heard the story of someone unplugging the wrong ethernet cable in the server room and taking down the production app? With Appistry it wouldn’t even be worth talking about anymore. Imaging how much money is spent to avoid that scenario? What if it just didn’t matter anymore? I wonder how many middle ware solutions would survive a live network cable swap?
I’ll be at JavaOne next week, come over to our booth and I’ll let you unplug some cables.
-jasen
