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Can't imagine I'd want to be with in miles of the group at Unisys or IBM responsible for supporting the IRS.

"Per the ESS Managed Services contract, Unisys or IBM as the managing contractors who are responsible for the IRS Tier 1 storage environment should have been first to identify the outage and contact the IRS. During this outage, it was the IRS who initially recognized a problem, and the IRS had to reach out and notify its contractors to prompt action on remediation. The contractors did not uphold their contractual agreement."

It seems like it comes down to a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't decision to install (potentially?) major upgrades as soon as they come out, or wait to see if early adopters have any issues.

While knowledge of the issue from January for another IBM client would have changed things, I'm not sufficiently familiar with if issues like this are routinely spread among the install base.

It sounds like the presentation of the firmware upgrade had about as much information as change logs (unfortunately) normally do: Fixed bugs. Performance enhancements. &C with no further detail. Details would have perhaps aided in identifying the issue more quickly once it began happening, but I'm not sure I believe it would have changed the initial decision unless it was something whose trigger was inevitable.




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