Webninja

So, I’m reading a blog post this morning by an ex-Apple employee talking about working in AppleCare support, and while most of it is just a rant, one part of it really spoke to me.

I’m going to be without my computer for a week?! It’s a business critical machine! I can’t be without it!…If something is important to you, you spend money to make it reliable. If you cannot make it reliable, then you make it redundant. It’s a life lesson more than a computer lesson.

Not long ago we were talking to a client who was just planning a move to ESX and wanted to know how many host servers he would need for the number of machines that were being virtualized. We looked at what they currently had and how hard they were working and said “It will all run on one 4-way, so get two of them.” They seemed shocked that we would so blatantly recommend getting more hardware than they “needed”.

Why do people have such a hard time understanding the importance of backups and redundancy? It becomes even more important in the virtualization space where a single failure could mean losing 20 servers, not just one.