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State of Virginia Technology Centers Down
bswooden writes "Some rather important departments (DMV, Social Services, Taxation) in the state of Virginia are currently without access to documents and information as a technology meltdown has caused much of their infrastructure to be offline for over 24 hours now. State CIO Sam Nixon said, 'A failure occurred in one memory card in what is known as a "storage area network," or SAN, at Virginia's Information Technologies Agency (VITA) suburban Richmond computing center, one of several data storage systems across Virginia.' How does the IT for some of the largest departments in a state come to a screeching halt over a single memory card? Oh, and also, the state is paying Northrup Grumman $2.4 billion over 10 years to manage the state's IT infrastructure."
Reader miller60 adds, "Virginia's IT systems drew scrutiny last fall when state agencies reported rolling outages due to the lack of network redundancy."
No, it kinda sounds like he believes IT outsourcing is a bad idea for any organization. But thanks for nothing.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
ZING! You really made a great point there about how government is well-suited to do things like this better than private enterprises - we all know that companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and dozens of Financial Services firms know nothing about operating redundant, fault-tolerant, and high-availability systems! This single case has amply demonstrated that the free market is a sham, and the government should pretty much manage everything.
I suspect this has nothing to do with "government" vs. "free market," and everything to do with "we hired a contractor who didn't know what the fuck they were doing, and so our system has design flaws, and so it crashed. Oh, and we also delivered poorly documented requirements, a shitload of scope creep, and gave preference to some contractors' bids because they were friends with the head of our agency!"
Not surprisingly, this is a risk when the support contract goes to the person with the best connections and lobbying, rather than the best design specs and capability.