HP managers are reaping the harvest of their deep cost-cutting at EDS, in the form of a massive mainframe failure that crippled some very large clients, including the taxpayer-owned bank RBS.
via EDS mainframe goes titsup, crashes RBS cheque system • The Register.
The Royal Bank of Scotland is a National Bank and a big player in the European banking market. In Datacenter speak 5 Nines of availability is a guarantee the computer will stay up and running 99.999% of the time. This roughly calculates to 5.26 minutes of downtime allowed PER YEAR. This Royal Bank of Scotland computer was down 12Hours which tranlates to 99.8% Reliability. I think HP and EDS owe some people money for breaking the terms of their contract. It just proves outsourcing is not a cure-all for cost savings. You as the customer don’t know when they are going to start dropping head count to inflate the value of their stock on Wall Street. And when the economy soured, they dropped head count, like you wouldn’t believe. What does that mean for outstanding contracts to provide datacenter services? Well it means all bets are off, you get what ever they are willing to give you. If you are employed to make and manage contracts like this for your company be forewarned. Your outsourcing company can fire everyone at the drop of a hat.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 