Re: Alternatives to Iron Mountain

Yes the machine has an HA backup. Let me ask you this, if your primary
lost several drives (perhaps you were on vacation and no one else noticed
the errors piling up) how long would it take you to get it back up and
running? I bet I could get mine up and running in 24 hours. How long
would it take you?
- Have to order keys for machine: HA software, ERP software, barcode
software, and so on.
- Have to reconfigure all the comm: Gee, who remembers how to configure a
Schowler route?

Meanwhile you're running on a machine you've only did swap tests on during
the occasional weekend, and while running live for a week you discover:
- There were several libraries that people thought were static and didn't
need HA replication. They were wrong.
- How come all the vendor fixes we put on the primary machine are not on
the HA machine?
- What clown thought we could do without certain applications during a
crisis and people should just "cowboy up" until the crisis is over?
- Oh, and you really thought we could go from running on a 570-MMA to a
9408-M25 actually running more lpars and the users wouldn't start talking
about how the director of IS should now become a eunuch for letting
performance get this bad?
- And the BOFH is pitching a fit about having to back up on a single
cartridge tape drive instead of a 6 drive tape loader capable of holding
over a 100 cartridges.
- Oh and that was a clever idea to offload query processing to our HA
machine. However now that the primary is down and the undersized HA
machine is not only running the primary load but also the query processing
the users are saying "them's that die are the lucky ones...".

Rob Berendt