Virtualization Plan at North Pole Leads to Christmas Chaos for Santa!
Has your organization had to deal with the headache of moving to a virtualized operation? Then you’ll be able to sympathize with poor Santa who decided to go virtual and cloud-native for Christmas 2019. His lack of planning meant things were neither merry nor bright …
Definitely not the most wonderful time of the year
Santa had decided to virtualize his entire operation end-to-end – from managing the GDPR requirement of children’s letters, right down to packing, labeling and order fulfilment (also known as delivering down the chimney).
Explaining his deployment plan, Santa commented: “Mrs. Claus has been going on at me ALL year to modernize my old ways. In my desperation to stop her complaining, I called Unnamed Vendor – everybody’s heard of them right. Well the very next day these 3 Wise Guys showed up from Unnamed Vendor and said they could virtualize my whole operation in 6 weeks! How could I say Ho Ho NO!”.
A blue blue Christmas
And so the migration began. The next week the three Wise Guys returned bearing gifts – but not the sort of gift Santa needed There was little consideration of Santa’s legacy system, and no education at all of the unexpected results that can occur when migrating infrastructure.
Worst of all (and you might have to concentrate to understand this one …) of course, Santa’s operation is powered by elves – six elves in total. These vital elves come from different parts of the world, but they all share a common name that means “nine”, in six different languages: There is Neun from Germany; Nove from Brazil; Neuve from Spain; Devyat from Russia; Nio from Sweden; and Neuf from France.
As everyone know, Santa’s operation requires a minimum of five elves at all times – or as we like to say, “five nines”. But this Grinch-like vendor’s virtualization solution was only capable of powering three nines! Reliability fell through the floor as everyone realized it was a Bah Humbug moment at the North Pole!
‘Twas the night before Christmas
Things were going from bad to disastrous. As Santa inspected his new operation, would you believe there were siloes in Santa’s virtualized system! And worst of all, it was ALL vendor-locked to – guess who – Unnamed Vendor! This plan was not going seamlessly well. As Santa looked around in dismay a small tear trickled down his wrinkled cheek. This Christmas would be neither holly nor jolly and all he had was a distant memory of Christmas like the ones he used to know. Suddenly, Santa felt very old and very tired, like that old piece of legacy hardware gathering dust in the machine room, out of touch … and out of time.
Santa tried to discuss the situation with the big Unnamed Vendor, but, unsurprisingly, the Wise Guys had long since disappeared (they mumbled something about having to follow a star). Anyway they were gone, and Santa was left to pick up the pieces.
Poor Santa! Everything would now have to be done by hand – but that would take from now till next Christmas – and it was already Christmas Eve!
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas!
As luck would have it, it was at that point, just down the road in Stockholm, that Enea heard of Santa’s misfortune. They decided they had to step in, sending their team of customer support specialists to the North Pole that very day. In no time, Santa’s network was up and running with NO vendor lock in – Enea even installed a specially adapted CPE box (Customer Premises Equipment) so that , in future, Santa could monitor in real time who’s being naughty and who’s being nice right up to the point of receiving their present (whoops! I mean order fulfillment).
Hooray for Santa Claus! Once again fulfilling his mission to serve the world’s children, making spirits bright!
Returning from the Christmas adventure, Jan Haglund Enea CEO said: “If only Santa had come to us earlier – we could have saved him weeks of worry, not to mention downtime!” He continued, “virtualization isn’t just about technology. It’s about data and most of all its about people, yes, even elves! Fortunately, everything is now in order and QOE (Quality of Elves) is back where it should be. It’s blowing a blizzard out there, but I’m delighted to say that all the children of the world WILL get their presents on time this year!”
Well you could say it was a Christmas miracle! … or you COULD say we made all of this up one Friday afternoon, but in any case …
