Standardize the DataCenter on UTC!
Thanks to Acts of Congress and other bemoanings of time efficiency zealots – we have a lot of freaking confusion around timezone data. In my current datacenter we have the added problem of having 10,000 downlevel clients in the field that all want to report in their client time. Getting that to sync across timezones and have it all jive with PST/PDT is a pain in the tail.
Ever since a fateful bandwidth spike caused by the 2007 time change, I have considered moving the whole datacenter to UTC time. Unfortunately for me, things like reporting, Java and custom applications all don’t like standardized time after being on localized time. While my change appears to be laborious and long to implement, I encourage others who might read this to look at standardization to UTC right away to prevent future nastiness – especially if you do buisness with/in Arizona:
http://phoenix.about.com/cs/weather/qt/timezone.htm
