State of Virginia Technology Centers Down

bswooden writes "Some rather important departments (DMV, Social Services, Taxation) in the state of Virginia are currently without access to documents and information as a technology meltdown has caused much of their infrastructure to be offline for over 24 hours now. State CIO Sam Nixon said, 'A failure occurred in one memory card in what is known as a "storage area network," or SAN, at Virginia's Information Technologies Agency (VITA) suburban Richmond computing center, one of several data storage systems across Virginia.' How does the IT for some of the largest departments in a state come to a screeching halt over a single memory card? Oh, and also, the state is paying Northrup Grumman $2.4 billion over 10 years to manage the state's IT infrastructure." Reader miller60 adds, "Virginia's IT systems drew scrutiny last fall when state agencies reported rolling outages due to the lack of network redundancy."

They need a better network admin

[Nemesisghost]

Maybe they should hire Terry Childs, at least he won't let their network go down for something like this.

Redundancy

[CmdrPorno]

Silly state, expecting to get redundancy for only $2.4 billion dollars. Don't they realize they're going to have to pay a lot more than that to get a reliable network?

Sorry, has to be said...

[Omega Hacker]

I think the id10ts who pulled off this stunt are rather DIMM....

Re:Well.....

[jeffmeden]

HAHAHAHHAHAHHAHHA - stupids

"This is supposed to be the best system you can buy, and it's never supposed to fail, but this one did," he said

And iv'e got a bridge for sale in San Francisco...

Throw in your city's cisco-powered WAN and I'll take it!

Typical liberal overreaction

[BitHive]

Guys, accidents happen. This "Northrop Grumman", whoever they are, will no doubt be fired and not receive any more contracts once word of this gets out. This will put pressure on them to provide better services, or be out-competed by other entrepreneurs. Our free market system works, you just need to expect this kind of thing when it's government doing the hiring.

Re:Question.

[jeffmeden]

"What could possibly be the difference between raid0 and raid1? Come on, who would put those radio button choices so close together if they really meant opposite things!"

Re:HA fail

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Also, this can happen when you hire an external firm to manage something that you should be managing yourself. External managers for projects like this are motivated by extracting as much money as possible from you. Internal departments of technology, by comparison, are motivated by convincing co-workers to not shout at them.

B-b-but you're saying that the bloated corrupt government that takes money from people at gunpoint and has no incentives for efficiency might have done a better job than a private contractor that works on the God-given free enterprise system that rewards efficiency and punishes waste! That's unpossible!

Re:It's always money

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah? Well YOUR momma so stank, she lay down on train tracks and nothing happened 'cause not even the train would hit that.

Re:HA fail

[pnutjam]

I started working for a city government earlier this year, let's just say I was amazed, I won't qualify it as amazed in a good way or bad way, but, you know...