[LINK] virgin blue outage II

Bernard Robertson-Dunn brd at iimetro.com.au
Mon Feb 21 16:02:13 AEDT 2011


On 21/02/2011 3:06 PM, Philip Argy wrote:
> Could the use of solid state disk arrays make them abnormally vulnerable to
> a power outage?  It seems pretty amazing to me that something as simple as a
> power outage would be an issue in this day and age!

I have no particular knowledge of Virgin blue's infrastructure but....

There have been a couple of outages recently, the discussion you 
referenced is not one that was related to a power outage. The 
discussion, above, was about an outage last September.

The recent outage was to do with a power outage. According to
http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/passengers-delayed-as-virgin-checkin-system-breaks-again-20110221-1b1ij.html

<quote>

"When the power outage occurred, it went to a secondary system — a 
back-up system at the data centre — the switch-over to that system had 
an effect on the check-in system for approximately an hour.

"We understand why the first outage occurred, but we do not know why, 
when the back-up system kicked in, there was a connectivity issue. We're 
investigating why that actually happened," the spokeswoman said.

</quote>

You might be amazed at the number of major infrastructure sites that 
have no real (and regularly tested) disaster recovery or business 
continuity capability (Note, I didn't say plan. There are more plans 
than capabilities.) You would also be even more amazed at who some of 
these organisations are. It seems that Virgin Blue belongs to the 
category "yes we have DR/BC and we hope it will work when it matters - 
but which doesn't ".

I've stopped being amazed, even in this day and age.

-- 

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
email:	 brd at iimetro.com.au
website: www.drbrd.com




More information about the Link mailing list