"Sysadmin of the Year" Winners Announced

lisah writes "Ten winners of this year's 'Sysadmin of the Year' contest have been announced and, while Robin 'Roblimo' Miller says it's not quite like winning the Miss America contest, being selected from approximately 2,500 entrants is nothing to sneeze at. This year's first place winner battled an office fire to save a RAID backup server, while another IT manager won an honorable mention for his dedicated work at a yarn store. From the article, '[The nominating entry said:] Any man who would take on a position at a yarn store, much less a technological position while surrounded by a dozen women, ages 55+ deserves some kind of reward...'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.

Re:Rewards?

[SoapDish]

No, but the Honorable Mentions get a case of Bawls Soda.

Re:sysadmins

[TClevenger]

Depends on how many hours of work would be lost as well. I take tapes offsite every Monday, which means that I stand to lose at most 5 business days of work. But if I had a few minutes and could grab the RAID out of the rack and take it out with me, (very possible, since it's a 2U box and not particularly heavy), I can save the time to reconstruct that week's worth of financial transactions, received emails and other work where the originals may have been lost (in the case of the entire building burning.) And, if nothing else, it's $3,000 less equipment I'd have to buy and reconfigure, and I can have a replacement server couriered from my vendor and hooked up to the RAID, and people up and working within 12 hours.

Re:Cocoon-like reward?

[tarason]

Hey, don't mock - I own a yarn store ; where family members work - I started computers as a VMS System Manager (REAL Computing bigot) and later 15 years as a consultant (VMS (while it lasted) /Unix/ NT) - I don't knit, But I do the web site.

Re:Burning down the house

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice try. Apparently disaster recovery and business continuity is higher up on our business priority list than yours. It is a very common problem even in large companies.

It's funny, but the previous company that I was with I had the pleasure arguing with management regarding offsite backups, disaster recovery plans, etcetera. "It's too expensive to implement" and "It'll never happen to us" were common phrases heard. Reality distortion field? On! Blinders? On! Drink the Jonestown Cool-Aid? Gulp! We're set!

2 months after I left that company, a water main burst next to the building. This should not have been a great concern, right? Wrong. The server room was below ground level because the rent was cheaper there, and management felt that flooding wasn't an issue because we were situated on "high ground", comparatively speaking. Comparatively speaking, so was the water main, and the data center was comparatively "lower ground". Water finds it's own level, and so it did, right into the datacenter. Funny thing that.

This literally hosed several million dollars worth of servers. The SAN completely cratered (Funny, I don't think it was designed to survive complete immersion....). The hard drives were likewise hosed, although the data was probably still intact on the platters. Where was the "primary" backups kept? Oh yeah, the SAN. Hmmm, Huston, we have a problem....

Fact is, due to downtime, and because their business critically depended on the operational availability of the servers, they lost massive amounts of revenue. The accountants will find a way to be creative about the loss on the balance sheet so as to not frighten the investors. I suspect they will call it "Rapid hardware amoritization and re-costing" or some other bean-counter double-speak. Oddly enough, much like security breaches, they will never disclose this "tee-hee oops" managerial decision, because we cannot lose faith in the exalted managers and executives, right? Riiiight.

Oddly enough, disaster recovery and business continuity plans became priorities shortly thereafter. I wonder why?