Douglas Adams was right!!!

42 =  Cloud Computing?

As an IT person, one of the most important things you learn is…

So, when one of the accounting staff mentioned first thing through the door at 7AM on Monday of last week that they could not access the accounting server, I did not panic.  After some investigating, the power supply in the server had stopped working.  We’d order a replacement, have it overnighted and be back up and running in a day.  Not a problem.  Easy fix.  Right?

So the new power supplies (We ordered two just in case one was bad.  We were thinking ahead.) arrive by 10AM then next morning and one goes into the server.  We flip the switch and the server…

…catches on fire.  Having had some experience with fire in the national office in Albuquerque I thought…

OK.  So now we have a bigger problem, but we also have a server sitting around from an application we moved to “the cloud” a few months back.  It happens to be almost the same exact server.  We figured we could pull the hard drives out of the scorched server, slip them in the spare and be up and running.  That worked until that pesky little adverb reared its ugly head – almost.  Almost is good enough for horseshoes and hand grenades.  For swapping out hard drives in servers, even with Dell Tech Support on the phone, not so much.  Server comes up but cannot recognize the drives.  This is when the panic scene from the Airplane comes to mind because now we are talking about getting a new server in here and:

• Being down for a few more days at a minimum
• Checks not going out or having to be handwritten
• Bad stuff man!
• Lost productivity!
• Potential late fees from vendors!

I kept telling myself…

We had given the hard drive swap out a 50% chance of working.  As we were swapping out the hard drives, in the back of my mind I was going into Winnie the Pooh mode wondering what we had to do to get a new server in up and running as soon as possible and then it hit me.  What’s the quickest way to do this?  The cloud!!!

We were planning to move our accounting package to a cloud-based solution in November.  The vendor made this option available about two years ago and had spent the interim refining it to the point where we were comfortable moving to that model when they stopped supporting our current server version effective January 1, 2011.

We called them to see if we could do it sooner, (like now!) rather than later.  Long story short, we sent them the data from our last backup before the server went kaplooey (Our backup has been cloud-based for about four years.) at 2:45 PM on Tuesday and they had us up and running in the cloud with our live data by the end of the day!!!

On Wednesday morning, our users were logging into the software and up and running again at our headquarters location.  Checks were going out in the mail.  Reports were being distributed to appropriate parties.  We were importing data from other systems into our accounting system.  Invoices were going out.  No waiting for a new motherboard.  No waiting for other parts.  No hoping that the redundant disk drives in the server were not fried as well.  No waiting on a Dell technician.

By Thursday, all the databases that had previously connected to the accounting system were connected to Excel spreadsheets that contained the table data.  The accounting software vendor provided these by the end of the previous day as well.  We even had one individual working at one of our satellite offices for the first time.  People can work now from anywhere now as long as they have an Internet connection.

You have heard me extol the virtues and benefits of cloud computing.  You have heard the folks at NTEN talk about moving from a reactionary IT infrastructure to a proactive/value/service infrastructure.  This is an example of where these concepts came together to equal 42.

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