Virgin Blue computer outage

Stop using non-technical analogies for technical problems. The comparisons aren't correct, and lead to false logic and poor decision making processes.

 

I would have thought that some of the oldest code still in production would be crazy proprietary cobol things used by finance or insurance that was initially developed in the dark ages that people are too scared to change since the impacts are uncertain, rather than it being particularly open.

That said I do think that open but regulated standards are the way to go, its just getting everyone to agree as to which ones to use..

 

Story about the fallout here

Looks like Navitaire is going to be in a lot of trouble over this - $AUD 20 mill is a fair chunk of dough...

 

Ooh Navitaire, used to be a bit involved with their Geneva software. Lots of stories there, and generally not good

Also was involved with Qantas when they were getting rid of one of their old systems that was being accessed by other airlines/resellers etc - they had absolutely no idea how people were even using the product. I flew over to Sydney to get a brief on how they were removing it, and it ended up being an information session for Qantas on what all the different companies were using the software for, of which nothing had been put in place to replace, and they had an end of year deadline to remove the old infrastructure because it was costing them so much to maintain. This was also not long after they'd gotten rid of most their internal IT staff!

I ended up resigning before that mess happened Maybe they're still running their old system.

I'm more suprised that our main airlines have things up and running as much as they do.

 

I just got word New Skies is down the gurgler again, and ppl like travel agents cant sell virgin inventory. Just the norm for VB!!!

 

Correct! we have SSD on our Compellent SAN which does storage virtualisation and can move our data at the block level between SSD/15k/SATA as needed for performance. SSD on the SAN is the only reason we can keep our Perforce server running smoothly ( busiest perforce server in the world ... by an order of magnitude ).

I know a lot of places that use RAMSAN devices as large cache devices for crazy fast access to data. You could set it up as a l2arc in ZFS, or use facebook's flashcache to devastating advantage for very large databases.