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chuckatkinson
12-Aug-2016, 05:51 AM
Probably everyone has heard of the massive mess at Delta Airlines this past week that stranded 1000's of passengers across the globe.

Imagine a company this big with a huge IT staff and infrastructure of over 7,000 servers and yet 300 of them are not connected to a backup power source? And just to make everything worse they stopped training their staff on their old 1960's vintage software which was still running but hardly anyone knew how to use it. And worst of all the total lack of a business continuity plan (BCP). This is even more important than the IT group disaster recovery plan (DRP).

So why am I posting this in the Cloud forum? Because all the system failures in the article for JetBlue, Delta, AA, Southwest would be very unlikely to happen had they moved their systems to a cloud provider.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/08/11/airlines-complex-aging-systems-lead-to-flight-delaying-computer-glitches/88539190/

FrankValcarcel
12-Aug-2016, 02:25 PM
I disagree Chuck. When you are as big as Delta you are your own Cloud provider. They are just a bad one. Now part of it could be that they have just absorbed a couple of airlines and getting the system merged always is a pain, but like you said there is no excuse for no backup power. I believe American has there servers in an old underground missile complex in Nebraska.
A few years ago I had lunch in Atlanta with an old school friend who works for HP and was on a 5 year project at Delta. His job was to consolidate the 1800 Oracle servers Delta had into 1200 over 5 years.

chuckatkinson
12-Aug-2016, 03:44 PM
Hi Frank - I can see your prespective I guess that it might be a consolidation issue. As I said not having backup power was their first biggest mistake but there should ALWAYS be a BCP in place in case something like this happens. It's amazing how many companies cannot even concieve how they can stay in business if a critical IT system goes down. At Exxon-Mobil in our division there was a 30 day BCP in place. The worst case DRP was 14 days leaving a cushion of 16 days. If the BCP went for more than 30 days then they would have just shut down the business affiliate because it would have been out of control by then.

chuckatkinson
12-Aug-2016, 04:13 PM
Pretty sure these people agree with me ;)

http://searchcio.techtarget.com/news/450302490/Is-Delta-outage-a-wake-up-call-for-IT-executives