Disaster recovery

Man I am tired of the doom and gloom but before I get started does Obama have a disaster recovery plan? perhaps he should get some of my spam mail from every cloud and virtualization vendor who tries to convince me that virtualization is disaster recovery. Interesting that at my company the owner said a real disaster means the building got hit by a plane and no one who knows how to take an order lived!

I think he has a point here worth talking through..(even though I do all the talking here in the blogisphere). So you do all the right stuff, second data center or cloud disaster center, both of them off your power and network grid. You even have generated power in your primary for 14 days as well as a satellite dish on you roof...but if the disaster is catastrophic, your building will likely not survive and everyone who reports to it to perform work on your systems is likely to not have access into the location or even worse the disaster shut down their power at home and all telecomm is down within some geographical grid.

So what is disaster recovery really? Well one more anecdotal reference. Way back in my IBM career I was managing a banking territory, and we had our own bi-annual conference. 6 or 7 banks would gather, and this was also around the time IBM was in a joint venture with diebold called siebold, for ATM or banking systems. Well I digress, when the subject of disaster came up so did keeping the ATM network up, so we discussed the scenarios. During the scenario discussion someone asked "what about client access to the ATM network during a nuclear event". I looked around the room, and said " let me see how should I answer this, perhaps we should not care if we can extract money from our ATM, perhaps we should worry about the fact the most everything we know will be slag, and everyone within the area of the "nuclear event" will be dead!!!

Ok I just had to tell that, now what is disaster recovery? I think it's about being able to get your people to your systems either in a remote environment or a remote location, meaning buses.

But let's not get confused with what a disaster is..a disaster in this sense is an extended outsage caused by something we can recover from, like a hurricane or a snowstorm.. It sure as hell is a not a nuclear event, a terrorist attack, a military coup, or even an airplane into your building..the disaster means you will have the people to do the work on the systems, not expired from some cause...without them it really is not a recovery issue, it's a hope you can survive issue..

Let's talk again soon, thanks for the input. At the sound of the click please leave your name and number!!!! VMWARE my ass give me a scud missile......

Why the cloud is bullcrap

Yeah I said that, I've spoke at conferences in support of cloud computing, and even helped lauch some cloud ideas at IBM and Navisite, but man it's becoming a cliche already...so many meaning it's become like cellular carrier claims 1g 2g 3G 4g omG! Since there is no real governance to claims to the otherwise I'm going to start a new paradigm called Universal Enterprise Open Heterogeneous Computing. See I used big words but I can't make an acronym so I'll need to try again? How about Inter-Galatic, Virtual Autonomic Network Homogeneous operating environment or IVANHOE..I like that it's was a 1960's tv show sort of poor robin hood rip-off, and well the moment Cloud computing started it was then called mainframe......