Slashdot Mirror
When IT and Bad Government Meet, Everyone Loses
Cron-os writes "The city of Wilkes Barre, Pa is furiously trying to enter some 25,000 tax records into their new PC network. Their aging AS/400 crashed sometime around April 15, and the city did not renew a maintenance contract with IBM because it cost more than the PC network. You can read the associated articles here, here, and here. I'm so glad I live across the river in a SANE city." I wonder if these bozos run their schools and roads departments with the same level of professionalism.
From the article:
IBM is willing to provide a maintenance contract for $850 a month.
How much is their PC network worth, anyway?
It sounds to me like somebody went and said 'hey it hasn't crashed in 10 years, I want this $10,000 in my paycheck because you already pay me so bad'.
Why does this make me feel that IBM is going to get the flack because they wont fix the computer, and tens of thousands of people will not get the refund checks etc and it wont be blamed on the idiot who decided NOT to renew it.
American Government is getting nearly as bad as American Corporations!
`find / -name "*your_base*" -exec chown us:us {} \;`
I'm guessing the powers that be are all non-IT types. You know, the kind of people that don't fix anything till it breaks. I can't count the number of executives I used to work with who never backed stuff up because "I've never had a problem before." Of course, it's always the IT grunt's fault when their hard drive crashes and their data is irretrievable.
"What do you mean, 'it's gone'? I NEED that data for this meeting!"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I do, and I work for Disaster Recovery Services: www.ibm.com/services/continuity The stories I could tell. . . they'll make you wan to pay cash and live in the hills.
The problems of Wilkes-Barre, PA became evident when their system crashed; many, many other cities and counties (and countries?) are in similar positions, and it is only a matter of time until their systems meet the same fate.
Recently I undertook a massive project to analyze and redesign the utilities billing system for Allegheny County, PA. The system maintains usage and payment records of all bills for water, sewage, electricity, and gas in county buildings.
Keep in mind that the population of Allegheny County is ~1,300,000, while the population of Luzerne County is ~312,000. Allegheny county certainly has the budget to do things right.
That being said, I was horrified to discover that the Allegheny system responsible for bill payment and other essential tasks was run on an archaic MS-DOS PC. Data entry is performed by two individuals by hand, and they are about six months behind. There are no scheduled back-up measures. Complicated queries are impossible. It gets worse, but I am not at liberty to disclose details.
Granted, the operations of a county are amazingly complicated, but something so important should not be left to a 15 year old machine with severely inflexible software.
It is a great shame that in this day of cost-efficient databases and powerful mini-computers that our government remains two decades behind. I wonder, are our nuclear plants run by obsolete systems as well?
Heed my warning: like Wilkes-Barre, it is only a matter of time.
To this AS/400 operator, they seem utter bozos for any number of reasons. Let's sum up some of them:
/38 and were running S/3x programs. Replacing the early AS/400 (type unknown) with a (modern) 270 would represent enormous savings in terms of power (110 volts instead of 380), space (a 270 is deskside-sized, not multiple racks) and time (jobs run in minutes instead of days).
1) No maintainance contract. This seems terminally stupid for a mission critical system. It's a case of getting what you pay for but frankly, my employer and I would probably not administer a customer's system without it. You see, the maintainance contract also allows you to get software patches (for free, I might add). The first article's specialist's opinion is entirely correct
2) No failover/fallback system. These days this is almost as bad a mistake as not having a maintainance contract. Though given the probable age of the hardware, not having a failover system is somewhat understandable. At the time the machines cost an arm and a leg.
3) Not upgrading the hardware. AS/400s are very reliable machines both in terms of software and hardware, but IMO you ought to replace them every 5-6 years or so. In this case, they seem to have brought in the AS/400 to replace a System/36 or
4) Replacing with PCs. This will create any number of technical nightmares and cost overruns. One of my customers took a long hard look at SAP a couple of years back. Their conclusion was that when total cost of ownership (maintainance, admin costs, power, etc) was taken into account, having two 'big' AS/400s as production and failover/test systems would over 5 years be cheaper and more reliable than an NT herd.