Downtime unaccepted.
Brad Feld, a Colorado-based VC, wrote an insightful piece on acceptable downtime for rapidly growing companies. It’s rarely the case, however, that executive management gets full disclosure on what root causes are responsible for the embarrasing downtime they’ve just experienced.
Will your IT Director disclose that he bent the SCSI cable bringing down the entire company’s SAN (Storage Area Network), or will he provide a slide or two on N+1 full redunancy with a capex budget increase to “fix” the problem once and for all?
Did you know that most readily-available network failover elements are not implemented because your IT staff doesn’t understand them in the first place? At the application level, how long has clustering been available and yet your company still hasn’t clustered its e-mail servers? And DNS still hasn’t been distributed, and backups and restores have never been tested.
The list is long, tiring, and boring…until your company falls flat. And maybe Brad is right. Maybe you will get a free pass. If you’re lucky, you’ve got a 2X capex budget to play with and your management team will swallow your power point slide explaining the unfortunate circumstance (without revealing the real root cause).
A data point of one
That’s really what you base your management decisions on when you accept chronic and embarassing downtime — a data point of one. Your IT staff’s assessment of what when wrong in their backyard.
By all means, seek out at least a second opinion. You will be surprised to learn that not all redundant system fixes require the brute force 2X spending to stop the bleeding.
Tags: downtime
