Chapter 2. What We Found in Our Travels

Since our first book was published in 1994, we've worked with companies all over the world, presenting at large functions, and teaching classes on the subject of how to effectively implement and manage client/server infrastructures. We provided insight on how to deal with the people and process issues. The reception and feedback were very positive. Since 1994 we've published four additional books on this same subject. Sales figures were excellent so we assumed the interest was still there, but why aren't all these infrastructure-related problems with client/server computing being addressed?

In our travels we learned a heck of a lot in visiting with more than 500 companies (probably closer to 1,000). The most apparent issue is how inefficiently client/server environments are being run. But that's putting it mildly. It's been getting worse year after year, and what's so disheartening is that there is very little to look forward to in the next several years.

These corporations are having a terrible time attaining RAS. No wonder metrics weren't being kept on server availability. How embarrassing it is to show that your servers were up 70 to 80 percent of the time. The customers were complaining about the hardware and their vendor without stepping back to look and see if their house (infrastructure) was in order.

In this section we document the problems from data gathered from more than 40 case studies and share the bad news with you.