A fun post for Halloween..enjoy!
“You know it’s Halloween…. everyone’s entitled to one good scare, eh?” This is exactly what businesses don’t want to hear when referencing their datacenter. To spare our customer from reliving this horror, names have been changed to protect their identities*.
It was a Thursday afternoon and all was clockwork. Truck Carrier Co.*, a 2-decade old, large truckload carrier agency, was utilizing their proprietary Transportation Management Software (TMS) as normal. The innovative software not only saved time by scheduling numerous carrier transports, but it saved the company huge amounts of money by automating the acceptance of carrier jobs. Each truck had a schedule and window of time for transport, and there was very little downtime in between loads.
All of a sudden… a blip. And in TMS world, this was a disastrous blip. The TMS technology stack was failing. Seth Brundle, systems admin, whispered in a hushed tone, “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” Carrie White, network engineer cackled out loud, “They’re all going to laugh at you! They’re all going to laugh at you!”. Seth knew what was at stake: Lost Revenue. If TMS was down, that meant all hands-on deck, and by deck, we mean phones. Everyone would have to manually call and schedule jobs over the phone. Oh, the time it would take! The missed opportunities! The HORROR!!! The Office Manager, Fred Kruger, would have to rally the troops, snap them out of their daydreaming, but also give warning: “Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep.”
Seth had to think. He would rather eat his lunch of liver and fava beans, but lunch would have to wait in a crisis like this. Even though he knew “a boy’s best friend is his mother”, he couldn’t call her - that would be psycho in an event like this. Seth knew what to do. He logged into Net3’s PvDC Cloud Portal and failed over all 127 servers over to PvDC Cloud – in a matter of minutes. “It’s alive, it’s alive, it’s ALIVE!!” Seth shouted with a mad scientist laugh. He was thankful for choosing Zerto for their disaster recovery needs and was especially grateful it was all done with a few clicks through Net3’s PvDC Cloud Portal.
Truck Carrier Co. was back up and running before most even realized there was an issue. Jason didn’t have to leave employees with nightmares of scheduling jobs over the phone. Carrie, was able to keep her sanity. Seth was a hero. While enjoying a few beers at Happy Hour, he toasted Truck Carrier Co. CEO, “Damien! It’s all for you! It’s all for you!”
In the ensuing weeks, attempts to bring the in-house technology stack back on-line proved to be futile and the decision was made to continue on PvDC’s production environment instead of making further investment in the existing infrastructure. What would normally cost a business days of downtime, customer attrition, embarrassment, and revenue loss was mitigated into an outage of just a few minutes. All is well now at Truck Carrier Co. Seth can be seen skipping down the halls with his pumpkin spiced latte knowing all will be ok – even in the event of a horrific disaster. If you happen to catch Seth and ask what he thinks about Zerto, all he’ll say is “I’m you’re number one fan.” To Seth, the misery is hobbled.
