A Spare Is Just a Spare

摘要

A friend called me recently to commiserate about a network outage at his organization. A backbone switch had crashed, and the spare switch displayed a low-level system prompt usually seen only when no software is installed on the switch―apparently the system software had been corrupted. Before my buddy and his co-workers could get the network back up, they had to spend valuable time reloading and reconfiguring the software. Although corporate management had done the right thing by approving the $20,000 investment in a spare switch, the IT team hadn't done its part to ensure the switch would be ready for duty should the need arise. Yes, it takes time and money to prep redundant components, but that's the price you must pay if you're serious about minimizing downtime.