Nadrek (3/31/2011)

---

For those with RAID; how many actually run consistency checks on a regular basis, to detect single drive corruption?
...
I would also note that planning for regular failure is both very expensive and very limiting; most products don't support truly transparent high availability with 0% downtime at all. Big mainframe hardware (and perhaps midrange systems) does; commodity x86 based hardware and software typically doesn't, with a few exceptions.

Eric M Russell (3/31/2011)

---

Disaster recovery is actually easier in the modern IT world than it was in times past. One hundred years ago, if the county courthouse burnt to the ground, much of the archived documents would be lost forever with no backup copy.

Tom Bakerman (3/31/2011)

---

This seems like rehashing old news. I have vague memories from a database class I took in the 80s where we talked about an airlines data center (AA or United or somebody big like that). Like I said, my memory is vague on this, but I believe they talked about Mean Time Between Failure of the disk farm on the order of 5 minutes (translation: there will be a disk failure about every 5 minutes).

The technology has changed, but the problems are still there and have to be dealt with.

TravisDBA (3/31/2011)

---

It might be easier as you say, but you would be surprised at how many shops do not plan for it by not even just backing up their databases up on a regular basis. It would astound you. I have seen shops I have gone into in the past that have not backed up their system databases in over a year!!! . When I asked why? the response was "Well we didn't need to, everything works just fine and if it isn't btoke we don't fix it... " Absolutely incredible, there are bozos out there in IT like this but there are. . Just because DR has gotten easier doesn't mean people are doing it.

Craig Farrell (3/31/2011)

---

I'm now picturing some poor kid wandering the halls of the data center with a giant shopping cart of new drives in front of him, just slowly meandering down the aisles looking for red lights with this zombie-fied look on his face at 3 in the morning.

James Stover (3/31/2011)

---

Fortunately the Cloud will save us from failure. Because we know how bullet-proof telecom infrastructure is. It never fails...except when it storms, or during peak solar activity, or when a fiber-optic cable is dredged, or the provider goes bankrupt, or during DDoS attacks, or...