Furthermore, the shutdown had occurred right in the middle of our lengthy nightly backups, so they were going to have to restore Monday night's tapes. Because the restore would have gone well into the evening, on Thursday morning the plant would be where they'd been Tuesday morning, with two days of productivity completely shot.
I asked Bill how the server had been powered up, and he said he'd just flipped the switch on the UPS. I recognized the problem immediately (having installed that server). This particular model of RAID array needed to be turned on and fully booted before the server was turned on. If the server's RAID card queried the RAID box before the box was ready, all of the drives would get marked as dead. The vendor had added a command line switch in a hot-fix that would resurrect the drives if this occurred.
I told Bill to put the spare server down and get on the phone right away to tell everyone not to touch anything. I jumped in my car and flew to the plant. Ten minutes later the server was up and running, with Tuesday’s data intact and Wednesday’s productivity still ahead.
Bill gave me some grief about undocumented switches, until I reached over to the bookcase next to the server and pulled the printed instructions out of the front of the RAID manual, where I'd put them when the vendor sent them to me.
By my estimate, I'd saved the company five times my annual salary in lost productivity that day. It was a really good day, too, because I received a job offer from a new employer that afternoon. When I handed in my letter of resignation to the CIO on Thursday, I learned that the VP of Finance had once again questioned my employment, on Wednesday morning while I was off saving the day. He'd suggested that the company could save money by letting me go for now, then hiring me back when the ERP project finally required technical people.
A year later, the ERP project was canceled. It never got beyond the planning stage.
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Server virtualization is a popular option for dealing with mounting datacenter costs. Another equally promising approach is the use of an Application Delivery Controller. Citrix NetScaler provides a low-cost way for organizations to reduce their server count and accrue cost savings from a reduction in space, cooling, power and personnel.
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The emergence of WLANs has created a new breed of security threats to enterprise networks.
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