$100 million dollars per mile and no redundancy?

“Light-rail service throughout downtown Minneapolis was halted Thursday for about four hours because of a downed wire that powers the trains from overhead…”

Apparently there is no redundancy.

I’m not thinking about this because I care about the commuters who were stranded, but rather because of how it relates to network and server redundancy and availability.  My group delivers state wide networking, firewalling, ERP and eLearning applications to a couple hundred thousand students and tens of thousands of employees. 

• Availability is expensive 
• We hear about it when our systems suck 
• We have no data that can tell us how much an outage costs. We are an .edu. Our students don’t switch vendors if they can’t access our systems for a few hours.

In that environment, how do you make a cost vs. availability decision?

LeanEssays: A Tale of Two Terminals

Mary Poppendieck's LeanEssays: A Tale of Two Terminals compares the smooth opening of Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital Airport with the rough opening of Heathrow Terminal 5.

A great read for those who've been at the tail end of a long, complex, schedule slipping scope creeping IT project (or for those who have been at the head end of a long, complex IT train wreck).

Via: Tom Limoncelli, Testing is a waste of time.

It is a Platform or a Religion?

Blog posts like this annoy me. "Anyone who was ever fool enough to believe that Microsoft software was good enough to be used for a mission-critical operation..."

I’m annoyed enough to keep that link in my ‘ToBlog’ notebook for over a year. That’s annoyed, ‘eh?

Apparently the system failed and the blogger decided that all failed systems that happen to be running on Windows fail because they run on windows.