Re: You are the backup

["Derek J. Balling" <dredd () megacity org>]

I actually had a paging company, when I was discussing "how do I get 
alpha pages to you", said "The internet is the primary method." They 
also indicated that they were preparing to retire their TAP servers 
as such method of out-of-band page delivery was "antiquated".

I asked "If I am reporting a critical router failure via an 
alphanumeric pager, how would it get to you?"  to which they 
responded "over the net of course". After drawing it out for them on 
a whiteboard, they finally understood the problem. Only after 
screaming loudly was I able to convince them that our mid-sized pager 
contract (couple hundred pagers) was going to vanish into thin air 
(at the time, our IXC was begging for it) if they made my TAP port 
vanish into thin air.

They finally did decide that "hey, maybe that TAP port is useful for 
something after all", but I can't believe the amount of work it took 
to convince them that "internet delivery" is not always the 
end-all-be-all solution for all things.

(not to mention that the TAP port averaged about 8 minutes faster on 
page delivery than bouncing through whatever internal mail servers we 
had and whatever systems they had)

D




At 5:46 PM -0700 8/30/00, Sean Donelan wrote:
> Poking around the AP newswire for details on their satellite problems
> yesterday I found AP retired their previous backup system.  For most
> AP customers the Internet is the primary backup.  A few AP customers
> also had ISDN or FAX backup.
>
> Whether folks tell us or not, the net seems to be included in more and
> more backup plans.