Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Happy Thanksgiving!

This year the Thanksgiving holiday has special significance given that I’m now working in the retail industry. Thanksgiving is quite literally the calm before the storm. The storm that is Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Those two days are the most important shopping days out of the entire calendar year to almost every retailer. What’s my biggest concern? That Black Friday and Cyber Monday will be too good, so much so that various front-end and back-end systems will fail and/or collapse under the surge of orders and shopping users. I’m not talking about just web based E-Commerce but also the traditional brick and mortar store fronts and all the POS (Point of Sale) transactions and credit charges that are sure to flood our data centers, servers and networks. Black Friday also marks the start of the holiday shopping season which runs through Christmas. That’s a total of 28 days where my team and I will need to be on our game and make sure we quickly address any issues or problems that might arise. Any downtime during the holiday peak is very painful to the bottom line. If for instance you have a website that takes in $1,000,000 an hour in sales and you’re down for even just 10 minutes, that equates to ~ $166,000 in lost sales. If we’re down for 30 minutes that’s $500,000 in potential lost sales. In this case downtime can literally cost you your job and then some. If that wasn’t enough the recent cyber break-ins at some of the largest retailers has everyone on edge.

It’s my belief that we’ve adequately prepared ourselves and that the infrastructure and architecture we’ve assembled including the Internet Service Providers and Content Delivery Networks will meet the surging demand over the next 28 days.

I definitely hope to enjoy the turkey, stuffing, carrots, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn and gravy this year, not to mention the ice cream and apple pie. Here in the states, football or American Football as it’s referred to abroad is a very popular sport. I also hope to take in some of the football game between my local Philadelphia Eagles and the Dallas Cowboys. The wife cheerfully reminded me after proof-reading this post that I’ll also be spending some time in the kitchen doing the dishes! ;)

Cheers!

Note: This is a series of posts made under the Network Engineer in Retail 30 Days of Peak, this is post number 4 of 30. All the posts can be viewed from the 30in30 tag.

Audiobooks – Spam Nation by Brian Krebs

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These days my commute to and from Philadelphia, PA can take me between 50 – 90 minutes one way depending on the time of day and traffic. That’s a lot of lost time which I’ve worked on trying to recover. One of the ways that helps to safely pass the time while I’m commuting is listening to audiobooks. I enjoy books and learning, I detest the amount of wasted time I currently spend in the car, and I really enjoy the ability to listen to audiobooks anytime and anyplace.

The latest addition to my library is Spam Nation. Spam Nation is Brian Krebs account of the Russian pharma wars that raged years ago. While a large amount of the story and information is somewhat dated there are still a lot of details to absorb. There’s also significant coverage of all the large botnet takedowns. I can still remember the takedown of the ZeuS and SpyEye botnets by Microsoft in 2012.

I personally enjoyed Spam Nation and it didn’t break the piggy bank which also made it a welcome addition to my library. If you are at all interested in getting a glimpse of the digital underworld then I would definitely suggest this book to you. Full disclosure here, there’s no affiliate link in there just in case you were wondering. :)

Cheers!

Note: This is a series of posts made under the Network Engineer in Retail 30 Days of Peak, this is post number 2 of 30. All the posts can be viewed from the 30in30 tag.

Network Engineer in Retail – 30 Days of Peak

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I’m a big fan of Greg Ferro and so I’m happy to accept his challenge of posting 30 blogs in 30 days although I’m going to try and put my own spin on it. Having been in the healthcare industry for almost 17 years and education for 3 years before that this is my first year in the retail industry and it’s been pretty exciting.

In healthcare I had 50,000+ ports under my stead and was charged with the care of critical life-safety networks. In retail I have under my care ~ 14,000+ ports and the responsibility of maintaining connectivity for multiple e-commerce websites that can generate in excess of $1,000,000 an hour in sales.

While there certainly are differences between education, healthcare and the retail industries they are all still looking for the same thing albeit with differing levels of redundancy and (high) availability.

I can’t promise 30 brilliant posts, not even sure I can deliver one, but I do promise a musing look into 30 days of a married father of three (girls), working as a manager for a larger retailer responsible for voice, data and storage networking during the holiday peak (November 25 and December 25).

It should be if nothing else slightly entertaining but please know that you’ve been warned, the next 30 days or so could be slightly entertaining or highly aggravating.

Cheers!

PS: I’m happily accepting guests posts from whomever is interested, I might even have the family through out one or two.

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