Air New Zealand outsourcing problems with IBM Global Services

apparently it is "IBM’s Newton data center in Auckland", so its not about IBM's ability to do platform migration, but to host a data center. Still some blame goes to the CIO for not having a proper DR site

2 years ago there was a power outage incident in Florida. There was some kind of accident that caused fluctuations on the power grid. As a consequence the local nuclear powerplant was shutdown. I think there may be a regulation that requires two reliable emergency power sources to operate to coolant pumps in case of emergency shutdown. One is the backup diesel generator, and the other is the power grid. Because the power grid was nolonger reliable, the plant had to shutdown. So basically the regulation aggravated a minor problem into a bigger problem.

Sometime in 2002-03, there was a power distruption across the US northeast, I think its because our power grid is on the verge of collapse.

And then there is the matter of sun spot cycles. Are we heading into a peak? there will be more solar flares, which if it hits the earth, could cause massive disruptions. How many of us could go one day without the internet?

JK: yes that the incident i was referring to. Ok so only 1.5 years ago, I am pretty far down the road of failing memory

Jax: if the data center is a relic, why would IBM be dumb enough to put their name on it. thats just asking for trouble. The betanews url says this was a 1999 and 2002 deployment, and part of it was Linux on zSeries, so we're not talking 360 stuff.

Still, lets wait for the report, and the counter claims.

also, the register

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2009/10/12/sidekick_hitachi/

is saying that the MS/Danger outage + data loss is due to work contracted to Hitachi Data Systems. It does not say anything about a HDS SAN, so perhaps they were migrating to a HDS SAN.

I am thinking that it not that the data was wiped, but rather the DB file was corrupted, and hence the db cannot be started, and there are no real backups. It seems when people buy a really really expensive SAN because it "saves money", so much money was spent that they did not have adequate disk space for a local disk backup, because disk space is soo expensive on the SAN that "saved so much money"