Curriculotta

We use Microsoft Exchange as our email platform and purchase it as a service from a leading (and very large) hosting company. In general, it works well, but they do seem to have many small outages. Our clients also use Microsoft Exchange, but internally hosted. They do not seem to have as many outages.

As we see more-and-more people working from home (be they employees or consultants) we are challenged with maintaining a productive work environment. (more…)

I recently refinanced my house for a lower interest rate. The final days leading to the closing give insight to the business continuity and DR improvements companies can strive to achieve. (more…)

“I don’t believe in Disaster Recovery.”

What a pretty bold statement in an initial interview. The interviewer/hiring manager was a former executive of a major “hot site” company, who played a pivotal role for many clients during the World Trade Center bombing of 1993. He had a fiery reputation, and visibly stiffened at the comment.

My second sentence put him at ease, reinforced our value set, made us friends for life, and most importantly got me the job! (more…)

It’s 4:00AM and your primary storage array just failed. That’s particularly concerning in a financial services company. Fixed Income traders start working at 7:00AM. You convene your incident management team and the decision is to failover. You inform your system and database administrators and the answer is that it might be riskier to fail over than to fix the problem.

Argh!

We invest millions of dollars in redundant systems to achieve high availability or disaster recovery and in some companies we are too scared to use them. We spend years perfecting software configurations and hardware clusters for failover but never feel comfortable enough to initiate a failover. Hardware and Software companies sell us new technologies with the promise of “5-nines” reliability, but nobody has factored in human emotion and fear of failure. (more…)