Apparently, The Airline Industry Hasn't Learned About Backups
from the incredible dept
It seems that the airline industry has never learned the importance of having backup systems. While that might be okay in some industry, in something like the airline industry, where the computers control everything, having a computer system go down is ridiculously costly. It seems like every few months there’s yet another story of an airline (or airport) computer system going down, stranding people, delaying flights and causing all sorts of mayhem. A few months ago it was both USAir and Delta subsidiary Comair, and today United’s reservation system went down for a while.
Comments on “Apparently, The Airline Industry Hasn't Learned About Backups”
presumably they're using fault tolerant systems
All hardware and software mirrored with no single point of failure, and probably extra redundancy within the storage network.
The administrators and DBAs are always a potential point of failure, though… if they screw up things can get nasty. Also, even fault tolerant systems don’t eliminate downtime (scheduled or otherwise), they just make the occurrences orders of magnitude less frequent.