In the 1970s, as a laid off high school math teacher,
I was sitting in my living room watching TV when a commercial caught my eye.
Being the days well before the DVR or remote control, I couldn’t fast forward
or instantly change the channel. So I watched.
The ad showed a slick, red Maserati sports car pull up
in front of a steel and glass building. The car stops directly in front of the
entrance and a debonair man of intrigue stepped out and entered the building.
Once inside, a beautiful young lady in a long white lab coat greeted him. She
helped him into his own lab coat.
The two walk by a set of computers – in the ’70s, a
set of computers took up several rooms – with lights blinking and buttons
flashing. They pressed buttons on the machines and then huddled over some data
they had extracted and printed via their state-of-the-art dot matrix printer.
It seemed the two were part of an exclusive, high-tech
club; one that I wanted to join. Their computer wonderland – while rudimentary
by today’s microprocessor-based, palm-sized computer standards – intrigued me.
The commercial turned out to be an advertisement for a
computer school. I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
I had no illusions when I enlisted in computer
training. I knew the IT lifestyle – this elite society – would be nothing like
the glamorous one portrayed in the commercial. In reality, it was much
different.
In the early years, I had developed an application in
Cobol for a Phase Four minicomputer at CBS, written CICS macro instructions to
program the IBM 2260s, and scratched my head in front of a TRS-80 trying to decipher an error message.
It’s no wonder why, several decades later, the
professional world gave us the unfortunate moniker of tech geeks! But, like
many of you, I wore the label proudly, especially since we tech geeks can make
an immense difference in the business world.
The damage to the data center was clearly severe.
Water had leaked on servers causing several customers to be offline for three
days. What good is diesel backup for seven days if there was nothing to power
–all the equipment was flooded!
We already knew how imperative it was for MediClick to
be prepared for a similar emergency. Just as they do today, our customers
depended on our software to order medical supplies for their departments –
often using just-in-time inventory and placing orders days or hours before
actual use.
We had a
well-documented back up plan to get our clients back up and running after a
disaster. We backed up the data and sent it off site to Iron Mountain for
protection. In the event of an emergency, we could put together another
co-location and restore the data.
With our recovery
plan in place, we knew we would be well ahead of a hospital’s ability to get
its own data centers operational after a disaster. In fact, our users
understand when a short period of down time is necessary after a disaster, but
we still weren’t satisfied. Moving the back-ups to a new server location
required a long downtime. Unfortunately, there were no good alternatives
available yet.
That’s when we
decided that we needed to form our own exclusive club within the IT world – one
where data downtimes were short and we were the heroes of the entire
enterprise.
Enter the hot-backup
solution. Technology had finally caught up to the long downtime issue. The
first step was server virtualization management, which was just making its
headway into IT. Then came the Utility Computing Platform.
Our downtime after a
disaster shrunk from a couple of days to a couple of hours.
In future blogs, I
will discuss how migrating from co-location to the utility platform satisfied
our immediate hot failover needs until MediClick could develop its separate DR
site. I’ll also talk more about disaster recovery and utility computing as well
as Software-as-a-Service, cloud computing, agile development and more.
It’s a new club, and you’re invited.
