RE: [cobalt-users] Re: cobalt-users digest, Vol 1 #279 - 20 msgs

["Lyle Scheer" <lyle@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A couple of observations and comments...

You have an application on a device, that if the device goes down, you lose
thousands of dollars a minute, yet I deduce from your note (you say you need
to recover perl scripts from the drive) that you were not backing up your
custom data on that device.

You did not have a recovery plan in place to minimize the minutes of
downtime, and had to determine on the fly what to do.

You are choosing to replace the Qube as a solution with a more general
server solution (HP and/or Sun), which (and I'm guessing here because you
don't go into much detail)... has a single user mode that lets you possibly
do more repair to the system and can get it up more quickly, or is at least
something that you have familiarity with recovery procedures.

Now, I can understand frustration for losing thousands of dollars a
minute... Using a calculator I note that that's over 1.4 million dollars a
day... that's a lot of revenue for a single point of failure, and certainly
for that much revenue you can afford a very robust and reliable solution.

However, I would assume that hard drives being mechanical and prone to
eventual failure, you might want a solution that is more reliable than a
single drive failure, or even a single system failure.

Not knowing too much of the details of the solution you need, there are a
few suggestions I might make.  An external, hot swappable RAID array would
keep you from being dependant on disk failures.  These units can be found
for HP, Sun, and even Cobalt equipment.  Also, potentially a level 4 switch
that has some sort of failover mechanism on the TCP/IP level can give you
machine level hardware redundancy that can keep your system from having even
a single minute of downtime.  In that case, having an appliance much like
the Cobalt system might potentially be an advantage... after all, the
concept of an appliance is that when an appliance breaks, it's cheap enough
to just replace on the fly.

You might not be aware that Cobalt provides a number of service agreements
that provide for overnight replacement of systems gone bad.  This would be
an option to look into with whatever company you use for your replacement
hardware.  There has also been mention on this list of various VARs (Value
Added Resellers) that can provide a high level of service.

I sincerely apologize that Cobalt's equipment failed you at a critical time,
and I'm sorry that we could not provide support that was of use in your hour
of need, and I hope that this message might provide some value and insight
for you, no matter which hardware solution you choose for your needs.

- Lyle


> They don't provide the CD with the qube, it's an additional
> $99 charge tohave one shipped. Not
> that price is an issue when we were losing thousands of
> dollars a minute. But that's moot now
> since we've removed the Qubes from our environment. And I
> will ban any use of them anywhere
> related to our company, or any  of our clients or partners in
> the future.
> I supposed that wuold certainly be possible, but we still
> (have too) would have to pull out
> the hard drive to recover the perl code we had on there.
> I was hoping that someone has designed some sort of feature
> (intelligently) that would allow a
> more reasonable recovery method.
> We're instead going to stick with our HP and Sun equipment,
> companies that seem to have
> actually thought out these issues.
> I understand the RAQs have console ports and the like, that
> would have been much more
> sensible, but eventhat aside, the fact they (cobalt) don't
> provide 24 hr support is certainly
> enought to keep our company from ever using their products in
> the future.
> Such a shame though, a well.
> Thanks,
> -Hawke