Sometimes Sometimes Redundancy Redundancy Fails
Redundancy is as complex as it is necessary
Stuff happens.
Of course, we all know that. Everyone has bad days where everything seems to go wrong and businesses are no different.
In our case, the hosting industry relies on thousands of pieces of ever-changing, ever-evolving hardware that need to be married with new standards and updated software. Problems do happen, even to those who plan carefully while building their infrastructure, but how a company responds when problems occur is far more important than whether problems happen at all.
At ServInt, we have always prided ourselves on being the kind of company that plans extensively. That being said, we are still faced with a serious, and slightly philosophical question:
Why do problems occur and how do we prevent them?
Our industry has always loved to tout how easy it is to be up all the time, immune to problems, and how technology can solve just about anything. Because the industry has been so successful at selling this message, we frequently hear comments like, “Well, if my server has RAID and you have redundant routers, how can anything go wrong?” Many assume, and justifiably so, that if something fails, the redundant resource should take over automatically.
More after the jump…
Business Means Solving Hard Problems
It Should Never Be Easy
When I first came to ServInt, our newly promoted CTO Matt Loschert told me something that stuck with me.
“We’re still in business because we solve hard problems.”
It’s a pretty simplistic sentence when you look at it, it deals with the fundamentals of capitalism and why it’s integral that we constantly innovate to beat back the law of diminishing returns. It’s an ethos that has pulled ServInt through some very tough times and helped us emerge as a leader in this space.
I want to see how our customers, partners, and friends solve hard problems in their business everyday and I’m announcing an opportunity to those who read this blog, are fans on Facebook, or to those who follow us on Twitter and Friendfeed to have a post published right here on this blog.
Tell us in about 300-500 words what your business is and how it solves a hard problem. We’ll post them here on The ServInt Source and promote them throughout the web. We’ll even throw in a T-Shirt for the effort!
The rules are as follows:
- Your post may be edited by our editorial staff for grammatical errors, flow, and length.
- The post will be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
.
There’s no deadline as of right now, I’d like to see what the community can come up with and I’ll post new submissions as I get them.
Now get cracking!
Submissions can be sent to busdev@servint.com.
Photo by godzillante.
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