e i g h t - c u b e d . c o m 

The support tradeoff

Today saw another disk fail in a system that we officially don't support. Funny how much pressure is brought to bear on us to fix it when a problem occurs though.

This system has not been touched since before I arrived on the job nearly five years ago. It was to be decommissioned for Y2K, but a vice president ordered that it be kept. Three years later, the business is still relying on it.

So were is the tradeoff? As this is the third time in as many months this system has failed and basically stopped work for in excess of fifty people, should the company bite the bullet and "officially" support the system? Three times it has taken me the better part of a day (and the first time, nearly three days) to revive it.

What is this costing the company in downtime verses what would it cost to maintain the system?

And we don't necessarily have to fix this system. The software supports a fairly basic scheduling package. I expect a competent programmer could knock something together in a week. Yet we are still unofficially supporting it.

Signing off in frustration,
Jim.