Re: Bank Databases

From: Matthew Zito <matt_at_crackpotideas.com>
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2012 07:08:49 -0400
Message-ID: <CAJ7936z-0ATwtzJ+6jyK-pet3n19QhSW5HoLZ+qhmkpr7_B_Zg_at_mail.gmail.com>

Yes, though I doubt it's anything as simple as an "Oracle issue". From my experience watching large organizations deal with complex crises like this, typically it's a series of cascading failures - so perhaps an Oracle database was involved, but many separate pieces had to fail in order to get to this point.

For example, I once saw a major global company's firmwide email system go down for over a day due to a cascading series of:

- storage array failure
- misconfigured hardware
- engineer typo
- misunderstood recovery architecture

I'm trying to keep it vague intentionally, but if any one of those things hadn't happened, they would have had an hour downtime on their email instead of a 30 hour downtime. I suspect the natwest issue is similar, *though* I do expect that we'll get more info in the coming days/weeks, so maybe we can get some more details then.

Matt

On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 7:01 AM, Howard Latham <howard.latham_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>
> So Nat west being unable to process transactions for 5 days due to a change
> in backup software and  fail over could well be an Oracle issue.
>
> --
> Howard A. Latham
>
>
>

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Received on Mon Jun 25 2012 - 06:08:49 CDT