Flowers Vs Servers – A Solution?
A while back I had written a post Flowers Vs Servers pointing out the similarities between the demand for flowers and the load on servers catering to educational institutions. I had ended the post concluding that since the former was a comparatively old ‘solved’ problem, we could try and extend its solutions to the latter. This required for us to understand how the old problem was solved and this in turn necessitated talking to the flower vendors and distributors.
For months this laid low on my list of things to do (along with a LOT of other stuff) but by providence rather than intent, I was able to do exactly that last week. While waiting for bus at KR market early morning, I glanced across to the countless flower vendors on the street across and suddenly the to-do list in my mind got re-ordered.
I immediately crossed the road and walked up towards a person who looked to be in his early thirties and a bit free from the selling (and the ungrateful wretch that I am, I forgot his name….thank you Mr Anonymous for all the help). To cut a long story short , both our verbal and non-verbal communication skills were tested to the extreme, so much so that, I am confident of cracking any dumb-charades question that even the most wicked of minds can cook up.
Anyways, among the stuff he said (or the stuff that I understood him to be saying) one idea particularly struck me as applicable in our Server case. Recount that our original crunch times came during festivals. Now think of a regional festival like Onam in Kerala, or Uagadi in Karnataka and Andhra or Ganesha Festival in Maharashtra (this is arguably not a good example). Now in all these cases the demand for flowers is very high, as flowers are one of the most important components in the celebration. BUT the demand is regional, so a solution to meet the excessive demands would be to import from other regions.
Now translating this to our scenario, let’s think of the results of different exams of different colleges. They are usually announced at different times, so in the analogy terms, the ‘demand’ for bandwidth is ‘regional’. So a solution similar to the ‘import’ solution would be to link up the servers of the various institutes using a common backend and share their resources for showing the results. By doing this they will be able to cater to the large traffic without increase in their infrastructure.
Of the solutions I heard this was the only one I was able to translate. Others included selective farming and also use of refrigerators (cold storage) at the retail level.
