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Cisco's Network Bugs Are Front and Center in Bankruptcy Fight (bloomberg.com)

Posted by msmash on from the buggy-bugs dept.

Reader Dharkfiber writes: Bloomberg is covering a story today about a hosting business that is now filing chapter 11 due to bugs in a switch. Good, bad, or ugly, is it time to admit that business really can't continue without IT? When will IT training become formal curriculum in schools?An excerpt from the Bloomberg report: There's buggy code in virtually every electronic system. But few companies ever talk about the cost of dealing with bugs, for fear of being associated with error-prone products. The trial, along with Peak Web's bankruptcy filings, promises a rare look at just how much or how little control a company may have over its own operations, depending on the software that undergirds it. Think of the corporate computers around the world rendered useless by a faulty update from McAfee in 2010, or of investment company Knight Capital, which lost $458 million in 30 minutes in 2012 -- and had to be sold months later -- after new software made erratic, automated stock market trades. Peak Web, founded in 2001, had worked with companies including MySpace, JDate, EHarmony, and Uber. Under its $4 million-a-month contract with Machine Zone, which began on April 1, 2015, it had to keep Game of War running with fewer than 27 minutes of outages a year, court filings show. According to Machine Zone, the hosting service couldn't make it a month without an outage lasting almost an hour. Another in August of that year was traced to faulty cables and cooling fans, according to the publisher.

3 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. When will IT training become formal curriculum by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Never? That's all being outsourced, duh.

  2. All Cisco users had this problem? by HornWumpus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    All systems have bugs, not all data centers have this kind of crap uptime record.

    Smart IT people build data centers out of heterogeneous hardware and set it up to degrade gracefully when something fails. You won't get this if you just hire A+/Net+ staff.

    Blame the PHB/CTO not the hardware.

    --
    John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
  3. IT training? by ilsaloving · · Score: 3, Insightful

    People will figure out IT training is important, when they realize that they can't make stupid statement like "IT training" as if it means something.

    What even IS I.T.?

    Are you talking about server management? Network Managment? DevOps? What skill sets do you need?

    It's like saying we need more brain surgeons, so we need MOAR BIOLOGY TRAINING!

    MBAs, or people in general, will never appreciate just how complex some work can be, because of Dunning-Kruger. They don't know or understand how complex IT is, therefore they are unable to *appreciate* how complex IT is. Just like they are unable to appreciate anything else that is complicated, whether it's medicine, physics, etc.