On 03/25/11 12:21 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
> So no one develops new applications there?
This is a large scale manufacturing execution system. You don't just go
off and design an all new system based on the buzzwords d'jour, when
your factories are dependent on it.
Picture large factory floors with dozens of assembly lines each with
100s of pieces of computer controlled industrial equipment, all
developed by different vendors, many 5-10 years old because THEY STILL
WORK, talking proprietary protocols to middleware layers of data
concentrators, which in turn talk to a cluster of core databases that
track everything going on, and then a maze of back end reporting
systems, shipping systems, data warehousing extractors, realtime
production analysis (ok, thats part of reporting), statistical error
analysis and trend prediction (feeds back into the reporting databases),
etc, etc. There's also subsystems that monitor the overall process
flow and manipulate production workloads and product mix, etc etc.
ALL this stuff would need replacing to work with a radically different
core architecture. The last major upgrade of the core database
architecture took 5 years to deploy in parallel with the previous system
after 5 years of development (and it maintained backwards compatability
with the floor/middleware side of things). All of our ongoing
development work is evolutionary rather than revolutionary, new pieces
have to be compatible with old pieces. We thought we could kill off
the legacy support for some really old factory floor MSDOS based systems
that used some truly ancient protocol APIs we'd developed over 15 years
ago, and we discovered there's still a few 100 of those burn-in ovens
running in some of the more remote factories, so we still need to handle
the oddball data format they generate (yes, there's middleware layers
that translate the really ancient into the merely antique). The
physical factories are in a perpetual balance on the edge of chaos, if
there's a problem on a line, work in progress gets manually moved off to
other lines, events can arrive at the core database out of sequence due
to network buffering delays yet we need to process them in order and
still be able to produce accurate responses 1 second of realtime after
the preceding event. Every phase of the data flow has resilience
designed in.
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