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?

-----Only as long as it takes to get drives in house and get everything
back in order.

- Have to order keys for machine: HA software, ERP software, barcode
software, and so on.

-----Already have SWMA with vendors. In disaster its as simple as a phone
call

- Have to reconfigure all the comm: Gee, who remembers how to configure a

Schowler route?
-----Comm is set up so it only takes a flush of the DNS to switch us to
the back up machine.

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.

-----All our production programs and data are replicated. Even user
libraries and our programming libraries.


- How come all the vendor fixes we put on the primary machine are not on
the HA machine?

-----Like I said, all production code and objects already synched.

- What clown thought we could do without certain applications during a
crisis and people should just "cowboy up" until the crisis is over?

-----That's why its not a true HA system if this is the case.

- 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?

-----Your HA machine should ALWAYS be as big as your production, otherwise
what's the point? If your main facility burns to the ground and you need
to run on the HA box for a while then you'd be in bad shape. That is a
major mistake made by many HA implementors. They go cheap instead of
reliable.

- 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.

-----Why not have the redunant set up like production?

- 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...".
-----Mistake.




If you aren't going to set up your HA disaster recovery plan to include
everything that you do in production its really not much of an HA disater
recovery plan. Its just a "little" better than your nightly backup
solution. Most of these issues shouldn't be issues if HA disaster
recovery is set up properly. Its not cheap or easy to test, that's why
you need to practice fail overs and roll overs a few times a year and have
people run production on the backup system to make sure all the pieces are
there.

just .02


Thanks
Bryce Martin
Programmer/Analyst I
570-546-4777
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