Top flight Desktop Management

摘要

It's Dec. 25, 2004, and thousands of people have packed airports trying to get home for Christmas dinner. After bad weather forces some flight-crew juggling, an overflowed 16-bit counter knocks out the computer systems of Comair, a Cincinnati-based subsidiary of Delta Air Lines. Some 1,100 flights are canceled. Later, Delta shares fall. The U.S. Department of Transportation announces that more than 260,000 passenger itineraries were affected and launches an investigation. The IT staffers get coal in their stockings. And the airline industry, including SkyWest Airlines, learns the hard way that automated data networks simply have to work. Although the main thrust of this On Location cover package is SkyWest's implementation of Altiris' lifecycle-management suite, let's take a moment to look at the big IT picture. Those of us who get up close and personal with large-scale technology systems know that even the most robust, fault-tolerant setup can hiccup, sometimes for laughably pedestrian reasons. The fallout, however, is no joke.