SA Post Office IT systems downtime

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Jamie McKane

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SA Post Office IT systems downtime

The SA Post Office has announced that its IT systems, including those used by Postbank, will be down from 22:00 on Saturday 18 May until 06:00 on Sunday morning.

This downtime is scheduled to accommodate the SA Post Office's IT unit testing back-up and uninterrupted power supply (UPS) systems.
 
Who from the Public approved this change for downtime?

And WTF: Postbank offline for more than 8-hours?? Is this what we can expect from a state-owned Bank?
 
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How the FSCK does it take 8 hours to test backup and ups systems?!?!?!?!

Should be able to test those with minimal, if any downtime to the prodution systems...
 
ToxicBunny said:
How the FSCK does it take 8 hours to test backup and ups systems?!?!?!?!

Should be able to test those with minimal, if any downtime to the prodution systems...
Click to expand...

What do you think happens if the UPS in your data center isn't working, and when you test it you just end up shutting down all your production servers by accident?

lol. Things like this need to be carefully planned, unless you're an IT guy because then you just blame the developers.
 
whatwhat said:
What do you think happens if the UPS in your data center isn't working, and when you test it you just end up shutting down all your production servers by accident?

lol. Things like this need to be carefully planned, unless you're an IT guy because then you just blame the developers.
Click to expand...

Carefully planned yes....

8 hours of downtime to test them? Nope...

Of course I would say that it shouldn't take that long to test them if all the systems are properly architected... so maybe 8 hours is actually reasonable with the crap IT systems the Post Office has...
 
ToxicBunny said:
Carefully planned yes....

8 hours of downtime to test them? Nope...

Of course I would say that it shouldn't take that long to test them if all the systems are properly architected... so maybe 8 hours is actually reasonable with the crap IT systems the Post Office has...
Click to expand...

It really depends, and the article isn't really helpful as to what they are testing as it just says backups and UPS.
So this could be a full drill for testing redundancy in the power, networking and other infrastructure to bringing their systems online from backups on other hardware.

A lot of companies claim to have "DR" and have absolutely no clue how to bring their systems back online if something happens to their data center. At least it seems SAPO might be doing something about it, which should be applauded.
 
ToxicBunny said:
How the FSCK does it take 8 hours to test backup and ups systems?!?!?!?!

Should be able to test those with minimal, if any downtime to the prodution systems...
Click to expand...
Agrred. It should not require downtime. Dual power grids, dual production systems (apart from DRP). Sound leading/belading edge? Twenty years ago one bank flip-flopped weekly between two location ~15kms apart Where I was instrumental in deploying a 2nd fallover live/DRP environment at another bank, we worked our behinds off over one weekend. Just in time, the Tuesday there was a site failure. Nationally nobody even realized it, it was just a lot of behind the scenes work to get the site up and reports out afterwards. The systems switched as tested the Sunday. Non-event.

But then again, it is the Post Office. Nobody will even realize it ;)
 
What is SAPO's idea of a system and why does SAPO think it has such things?
 
Sollie said:
Please do enlighten us as to why you consider it Dunning Kruger.
Click to expand...

Because he does not enough experience and knowledge as to what entails data center infrastructure or disaster recovery testing to be making any sweeping statements or assertions.

If he did he would be making a fortune working for AWS or Azure running their infrastructure teams.
 
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