I have to admit, the all nighters I’ve pulled in my career probably netted me more in terms of serious “in the trenches” know-how than anything else I’ve done. But boy they can wipe you out. Those holiday weekends can be the hardest. With Xsan volumes reaching into the hundreds of terabytes now there just isn’t much of a good time to do a migration. But when things go a little funny, you have a finite amount of time to complete a given set of tasks. Often, those holiday gigs were planned months in advance given the severity of the upgrades and if you can’t shoehorn all those bits and bytes through those 2 or 4Gbps links then you’ve got to wait months for your next opportunity to upgrade.
But really, it always feels like you should have your own Budweiser commercial talking about the “real men of Xsan” when you’ve stuck it out and you walk out of the client with the sun far more awake than you and actually manage to drive home without getting pulled over or worse…