Originally Posted by
ph-sbe
From an I.T. management point of view, Delta are stupid.
Let's assume for a second that the whole outage was indeed caused by power circuits going down and backup power not kicking in. Fine, **** happens. Stuff fails.
What SHOULD have happened is that their entire system failed over to a backup SITE within 30 seconds. That is not impossible to do, and I just delivered a system (three months ago) that does just that. Ask yourself why Google, Facebook etc never go down. Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy and redundancy. And trust me, as an I.T. professional (MSc + JNCIE) I can guarantee you that this is not rocket science.
This time it's a power failure. Next time it's a criminal or terrorist act that takes out the entire DC.
Almost right - except I would make it a widely distributed redundant system so there is no backup just a system with two (or more) identical parts sharing data and transactions with redundant copies of all the data. So it is very over powered for what it is doing but any site can fail and the users don't notice not even a 30 second switch over. A distributed system is as fault tolerant (or more so) as a main system with a standby, but there is no expensive system sat doing nothing and failover is instant and transparent to the users.