This editorial was originally published on July 20, 2010. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.

I say an interesting blog from Sean McCown recently (MidnightDBA | Blog | Twitter) where he talked about a conversation with former co-workers. You can read it, but basically the SAN administrators warned about large LUNs (a 1TB LUN was requested) and they had performance problems. The LUN was a single disk instead of an array, and used this to prove they should be in charge of disk design when performance problems ensued.

On Twitter someone said the SAN admin should be fired, someone else said they should be disciplined. My take was that likely this is where a manager, or director, in charge of both groups ought to sit the SAN administrators down and have a "come to Jesus" talk.  It's time for an intervention that lets someone know their behavior is not to be tolerated and has no place in a professional environment.

Is this petty behavior? Is it malicious sabotage? Is it just immaturity?

I think it could be all of these, and it's up to management, and leadership to work this out. If this is the first occurrence, or maybe one of the first few of minor incidents (assuming this was minor in its impact), then you have a fairly straightforward talk with the people. This behavior isn't productive and getting into a contest to prove something, perhaps at the expense of clients, isn't acceptable. If it's happened before, I would learn towards disciplining the person in some formal way.

If it's the third strike, well, as they say in baseball, you're out.