Comments on: Air New Zealand’s outage last fall

By: Dave Moon

Dave Moon — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 01:02:43 +0000

Re: penny wise and pound foolish – you can buy a lot of data centers for the price of one new Boeing 737. The operating cost of data centers is probably a lot lower too.

But like another commenter said, avoiding revenue loss never looks as good to the suits as producing revenue.

By: Kate Woodruffe

Kate Woodruffe — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 21:00:18 +0000

Just a note to say that the Newton Data Centre is not an IBM data centre. IBM manages Air NZ’s systems within the DC but is not responsible for the infrastructure itself.

By: Robert Goldman

Robert Goldman — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 13:51:36 +0000

This seems like a specific instance of a couple of more general problems:

1. It’s hard to plan for events that haven’t happened and are very rare;

2. It’s hard to get resources for parts of the enterprise that aren’t revenue-producing. The backup survival plan doesn’t produce revenue; it avoids revenue loss.

We see this in lots of other parts of the economy: large chemical plants, enterprises which shortchange computer security, etc.

If anything, sounds like airlines and banks do this better than anyone else. I’d bet you’d find other economy sectors are far worse than this!

By: Scott Burson

Scott Burson — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 07:02:14 +0000

Here’s a great story about keeping systems well tested:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Designed-For-Reliability.aspx

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 15:15:42 +0000

I only hope the airplanes that the airlines buy in future will have rather more redundancy.