Originally Posted by
Nialler
I would dispense what that rumour as the work of someone who has little clue about large scale high-availability IT (such skills not being a prerequisite for life). Systems are not patched/tested on production environments (for the record a failback mirror site is most certainly a production system). There will be a chain of systems for testing, from a sandpit environment, through test, development, pre-production, eser acceptance testing then production itself. These type of fixes are usually completely dynamic, but those that require restarts require only that the operating system be restarted - not the actual hardware. There should be no power issues and certainly none where remotely distinct sites are involved.
Finally, given that they're still on a background of TPF, the machines running TPF are typically z-Series enterprise servers from IBM. i.e. designed with internal redundancy and with continuous uptime as one of the core aspects of their architecture. Their power requirements have shrunk from a time when, yes, the airport lights might flicker as the beast was woken up, through to today's models, which are CMOS based and run off little more than a kettle connection. The meantime between failures on these machines is measured in years. They do not fail in the type of circumstances described.
Thanks for posting it, though.
Hi Nialler. The rumour is not suggesting that the patch itself was faulty, just that the restart procedure was inadequately careful.
BA have no TPF neither in their own site nor, if Amadeus are to believed, in the underlying Amadeus architecture. This, I'm afraid, is all 'modern' stuff with hundreds of boxen performing trivial proportions of the overall workload.
If the fix is the SMB fix for WannaCry to the server, it could require an OS restart, not just an appliaction restart (depending on the OS). Even if it didn't, hundreds of applications starting will draw more power as they reload, rebuild caches etc.
Anyway, the whole thing is so unclear, and this from a man who claims to be digital to the core, that you have to think it was something enormously f'd up.