[Info-vax] One wonders why people bet their companies on Microsoft based products...

[JF Mezei]

BillPedersen wrote:

> When you have a potential "bet your company" event planned your first
> action should be to audit the environment first - including backups,
> as well as disaster recovery plans.

A former ISP of mine recently moved their mail store from their PC to a
SAN solution. The guy doing it has a windows upbringing, not an
enterprise one. (and the mail server is probably still a Windows box).

So, he just closed the mail service, and started to copy the data from
one machine to the new SAN system. Oops! he then realised it would take
something like 12 to 18 hours (can't remember the exact number). He had
not considered doing a test run before on the live system to measure how
long the copy would take. Had he done that, he may have started to
ponder alternatives such as physically moving the drives to the SAN
system and serving it from the SAN system to reduce downtime and build
the new raid-5 (or whatever) as a mirror of the old disk so that he
could continue to provide read-write service to the mail server while
the raid-5 array was being built.

I've see that "windows" mentality in many places. Allowing a service
call on a server in the middle of the day, not thinking of the fact that
such a service call yp add a new tape drive might not actually work. (in
the end, it had taken that company over 2 weeks and many visits to get
it working, not the 10 minutes that the manager had believed it would
take). This was not for a windows machine, it was an old Data General
one. So it isn't so much about "windows" per say, but rather the
mentality around windows such as "a reboot will fix everything" or "it
only takes 20 minutes to re-install windows so it is quicker to do that
than to find and fix the problem".