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Northrop Grumman Says 'I'm Sorry' For Virginia IT Outage
Lucas123 writes "After a storage area network in a data center run by Northrop Grumman went down last week, crippling 26 state agencies' websites — some for more than a week — Northrop Grumman has now apologized to Virginia, saying it will learn from its mistakes in order to recover systems faster in the future. Northrop's $2.6 billion service contract with Virginia's government has come under harsh criticism in the past for service outages, along with project delays and cost overruns."
Hermes: What do we do when we break somebody's window?
Dwight: Pay for it?
Hermes: Heavens, no! We apologize! With nice, cheap words.
I am officially gone from
The Maryland/VA/DC metro area is really starting to go down hill, from an infrastructure standpoint. Things are just falling apart around here...oh, and what's that? Instead of investing in fixing aging infrastructure, they instead are spending billions to build the ICC? Oh, and what's that? It's STILL going to be a toll road?
I've lived in Montgomery County my whole life, but I'm quickly getting tired of this place -_-;;
Living With a Nerd
I have a project in a separate NG hosted dataspace, in Virginia. They are killing us with incompetence and their sub contractors are worse then they are. We are still trying to get things certified and they won't provide us information about their hosting. We think they have us on virtual servers that belong to another project, and the reason they don't want to tell us anything is that it would reveal they are in breach, since we are paying for dedicated servers.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
To be fair, there is no evidence that Northrop is doing worse than anyone else would have done. We are talking about an enormously complex IT infrastructure here (or so I assume, since it is a government network), and this is not exactly a uniquely bad failure. A week may seem extreme, but I have seen smaller scale systems go down for that long.
I am not an apologist for Northrop, I am just saying that this is not exactly one-of-a-kind incompetence.
Palm trees and 8
The "old business man discovering the internet" IT bubble culture is still alive and well in the defense industry. They have such a bad track record with networking technology it borders on scary. Transformation comes to mind quickly and they keep repeating the same mistakes.
I don't know how many years on this Earth I got left. I'm going to get real weird with it. - Frank Reynolds
Fresh out of school with my CS degree I went to work on a project for my employer that involved partnering and working directly with folks from NG. The original deadline for shipping the solution was something like 6 months after I started. The complete and utter incompetence of the NG side of things wound up stretching this out more than 18 MONTHS longer, and the final delivery lacked a lot of the original stated requirements.
Being the newbie to the whole corporate culture, I was shocked that people were not bothered at all by blown deadlines, missed estimates, and huge cost overruns. Shortly after the project finally delivered, I bailed to work for a much smaller company (fewer than 10 employees) where I discovered that I really love the smaller, more dynamic environment that only small companies can provide.
Working for huge corporations just sucks.
I work with a fair number of ngc.com; I'm a contractor myself. At one point, I had a few interviews for Northrop and I'm so glad they over looked my talents because they seem to abuse the talent they have.
Now, this may not be for every department or division, but almost every NGC employee I know is basically well familiar with furlough. Whether good or bad, NGC is left with the ability to place entire departments on furlough to reduce overhead costs in the event a contract dries up. Now perhaps it's their size, perhaps they simply don't care about their workers, but this sort of thing seems to happen often. I'd guess that no NGC employee with a tenure more than 2 years hasn't been out of work for up to a month or so. But this is how things are run there.
See, government contracting works like this. You create a company, hire some folk to work on a contract. Whatever their salary is, you charge the government +50% or more, so essentially the government is not only flat out paying your salary but also the company for your services. If the contract ends, so does your job as the company may not want to charge overhead. In contrast to other business sectors, employment typically isn't grounded so harshly on the existence of a contract, which is where cost of business and business management can keep workers afloat even during down times (think department store).
I only point out Northrop because while all government contracting is essentially this contract+play model, Northrop has a reputation of placing people on furlough much more often than other companies such as CACI, Raytheon, General Atomics etc. Some Northrop employees seem to live the lives similar to actors and actresses in Hollywood, and I'm not talking about Tom Hanks acting, but maybe those actors that get little spots from time to time on your sitcoms. They literally live in apartments, and wait for the phone to ring day after day. Northrop employees seem to wake up in the morning, wondering if they'll still have a job at the end of the day.
What does this observation have to do with the op? Well, it seems that moral and motivation might be a bit low on a large scale at Northrop, so such blunders are no surprise to me.
It was EMC storage that failed:
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2010/08/31/emc_system_serving_virginia_breaks_down/
"A major portion of the network shut down on Thursday after some of the EMC gear malfunctioned. As many as 400 server computers in various government departments relied on the storage network and were knocked offline.
Both Northrop Grumman and EMC declined to comment, directing all inquiries about the breakdown to the Virginia Information Technologies Agency, which oversees all of that state’s government computer systems. According to the agency’s website, EMC said that Thursday’s breakdown was unprecedented. “The manufacturer reports that the system and its underlying technology have an exemplary history of reliability, industry-leading data availability of more than 99.999% and no similar failure in one billion hours of run time,’’ the website said."
Here you go, direct from our local news radio station.
"Northrop Grumman holds a $2.4 billion, 10-year contract with the Virginia Information Technologies Agency to build, operate and maintain the state's 7-year-old, problem-plagued consolidated computer services bureaucracy. It is the largest single-vendor contract in Virginia history. The partnership has been repeatedly criticized in JLARC studies for poor and tardy delivery of services, cost overruns and system failures."
These systems are directly integrated into the DMV, as well as the Department of Social Services and Department of Taxation, amongst others.
Living With a Nerd
"Northrop Grumman Says 'I'm Sorry' For Virginia IT Outrage"
good thing Northrup Grumman doesn't do anything important, like, say, vital national security support.
oh, wait... .
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
This kind of thing seems to be a growing trend in government IT. I'm posting anonymously because while I don't think I'm going to say anything that violates an NDA, it's better to be vague and sure.
The county that I live in recently made a move like this: they fired basically all of their IT staff and replaced them with the lowest bidding consulting company.
The upside of that from a certain fiscal standpoint is that they've eliminated a bunch of positions with pensions and good (and therefore expensive) benefits. These people have been replaced, in some departments, by the exact same people now subcontracting through the consulting company. This isn't really cheaper -- they won't have additional pension obligations to those people, but they're drawing much higher salaries than before, and obviously the consulting company gets a sizeable cut too.
In other departments, all the long-term employees have been replaced by new consultants. This is a problem in that, probably the people who had those jobs should have documented their networks and tasks much better, but the fact is, they didn't. The whole memory of those departments has been flushed. Inexperienced people are now trying to figure out how to maintain processes that literally no one who works there knows anything about. It's a disaster and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Meanwhile, the county executive is running for governor, touting the above as a great accomplishment. Hey, he shrunk the size of government by eliminating many permanent positions! By the time people realize that, not always, but sometimes, a lifer IT person is worth their pay because of the institutional memory they have of a thousand important things that were never documented, the election will be over.
Mod parent way up. I've seen it in other places too.
Often when you ask people in the accounting department, they'll say they don't really know what's going on because IT made the system. When you talk to IT, they'll say they don't know because the system was specified by Accounting. The truth is that some smart guys in each department got together and forged some sort of system together. Then the smart guys went on to bigger and better things, while the peons were left with some special voodoo system.
Now you want to move said voodoo system over to a consulting company. The assumption is that the Accountants know every detail of what the old system did. Well, they don't. But nobody is willing to step forward and say that. So the new consultants come along and gosh, nobody knows what the systems do.
Then people ponder why it "doesn't work." Sigh.
This is how shit happens.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Go see it yourself here.
On Wednesday, August 25, at approximately 3 p.m., the Commonwealth of Virginia experienced an information technology (IT) infrastructure outage that affected 27 of the Commonwealth's 89 agencies and caused 13 percent of the Commonwealth's file servers to fail. The failure was in the equipment used for data storage, commonly known as a storage area network (SAN). Specifically, the SAN that failed was an EMC DMX-3.
According to the manufacturer of the storage system, the events that led to the outage appear to be unprecedented. The manufacturer reports that the system and its underlying technology have an exemplary history of reliability, industry-leading data availability of more than 99.999 percent and no similar failure has occurred in more than one billion hours of run time. A root cause analysis of the failure is currently being conducted.
Anybody else read this like some middle age guy after "finishing a bit too quickly" and telling his , "I swear honey, this the first time this has ever happened to me..."
So Virginia taxpayers will continue to get screwed, but Northrop Grumman has now extended a reach-around?
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Northrop Grumman was cobbled together over several years from about 1999-2006 from Northrop, Grumman, TRW and several other players. It is so dysfunctional because it is composed of so many competing units that don't operate like a single company. In fact, when I briefly worked for them out of college, most of my coworkers were from TRW and hated the idea of being NGC employees.
Getting charged out at $100/hour while getting paid $10-14/hour was depressing, especially since the contracting company did nothing in that case apart from collect and hand out money (insurance, health care etc was my responsibility). When the client (actually former workplace encumbered by a requirement for layoffs and a hiring freeze) looked as if they would be able to employ me directly the contract company took near criminal steps to poison my relationship with that company. I left after being blamed for a quite few things that happened long before I'd even heard of the place and decided it was easier to work in a different industry.
Many places screw over both their clients and their employees.