Learning From FAA Outage: Testing for Capacity is Critical

SearchCIO.com:

..."Here we have a system that is vital to the flow of air traffic in the United States. It is hard to imagine how many dollars are riding on people getting to their destinations on time," said Gene Ruth, who covers disaster recovery (DR) at Midvale, Utah-based Burton Group Inc. "You have a failure in the network and there is no ability to [set] up a disaster recovery site immediately? That is completely unacceptable."

The root cause of the FAA outage, which lasted nearly five hours, was reportedly the failure of a circuit board inside a router at the FAA Telecommunications Infrastructure (FTI) facility in Salt Lake City. Details on why the backup router did not engage are still unavailable. The failure brought down a flight management system, forcing air traffic controllers to rely on faxes and emails to communicate flight plans....

Here are headlines of the four disaster recovery lessons to learn according to SearchCIO.com:

1. Equipment failure is the No. 1 reason for disaster recovery declarations.

2. Equipment malfunctions compounded by change or configuration management failures are a double whammy.

3. Testing for capacity is critical in IT disaster recovery planning.

4. But foolproof testing is sometimes impossible.

[Read the whole thing]

posted by: gqpartner