Not necessarily, it's the window offered to cut in the fixed production SAN. They have been running on backup since Monday morning when the show finally hit the road again. You may have also noticed their sale related activity has been quite lax over the last week to ensure low loads on the back up system.

Edit: Beaten.

I am not an IT guy, so perhaps someone a little more informed can fill in the gaps.

If the backup system was meant to be operational within three hours, why does VB need to allow (well in advance and in a non emergency situation) over 24 hours to switch from the backup system to the primary system ? Sounds a touch shambolic.

I was

and from a little research it would appear New Skies in an unmitigated disaster. and that the Virgin Blue SNAFU wasn't the first one. Ryannair also suffered badly previously.

this summary from the register on the VB outage.

The Navitaire cock-up, filleted ? The Register

"It is becoming more and more obvious that Navitaire's business continuance and disaster recovery provisions failed completely in this outage. There should have been standby systems ready to take on the load of any failed system or system component, but there weren't any. That is a blunder of the first magnitude by whoever designed, implemented and ran the system"

I can't see this continuing to be VB's system of choice much longer. or anyones really. can't have mission critical systems going off for hrs at a time. Ryan lost their system for at least 6 hrs form 10.45am on 20 Sept

Perhaps Navitaire (like Virgin) also outsourced a mission critical system, namely their continuance and disaster recovery provisions?

I suspect it was because they had to, not because they wanted to! From what I have read the backups were supposed to come online ASAP but VB still had to wait, which added insult to injury.

In time they ought to receive compensation for the money they had to spend and I'm sure there are clauses in their contract which will allow them to tear it into pieces :ok: