Re: Cost of tape drives

Neil,

In a message dated 98-01-21 12:16:13 EST, you write:

<<snip>>
>       The problem is, if the backup _isn't_ unattended, it often doesn't 
>happen.
>       Heck, over the holidays we lost a week's worth of eight developers' work
due
>       to a head crash on our development machine.  Someone had taken our 
>source
>       library out of BRMS' save list because it "took too long to back up",
DESPITE
>       the fact that the backup was unattended.  Duhhhhh! 
>  
>               I presume this individual is now unemployed and living
>  in a van down by the river ?   :-)

You would be wrong, sir!  Typical "big company" politics -- nobody's exactly
sure who did it, nobody's exactly sure _why_ the crash occurred (three
versions of the story so far -- and counting), we don't need mirroring because
we've got RAID, RAID didn't work because -- well it just didn't, the CE
couldn't "pump" any of the drives because -- well he just couldn't.

The sad thing is, there is a pervasive attitude of "well it's _JUST_ the
Development box".  Unfortunately, source code "_JUST_" isn't transferred to
the Production box!  Nobody from operations checked the 7 _THOUSAND_ page job
log from the restore to see why it _was_ 7K pages (can you say "n security
and/or data format changes occurred?  I _knew_ you could!), and we've been
fixing things piecemeal for almost a month as we find them to be missing or
incorrect.

Wanna hear something _REALLY_ scary?  BRMS failed on 12/13/97 and the on-call
tech walked operations through a manual backup.  As the latter wasn't a "BRMS-
tagged" backup, the tapes went to the scratch pile instead of off-site storage
and _just happened_ to have not been used.  Y2K has been our focus since March
'97, and our source library was excluded from BRMS in July...

Of course, "it's _JUST_ the development system".  All 80Gb and four
plants'-worth (totalling a little over $2B worth of annual production) of
source code.  No need to audit _that_ quarterly for disaster procedures, is
there?
<<snip>>

Must _Just_ Be Me,

Dean Asmussen
Enterprise Systems Consulting, Inc.
Fuquay-Varina, NC  USA
E-Mail:  DAsmussen@aol.com

"I thought that I was wrong once, but I was mistaken..." -- Anonymous
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