On November 25, 2010 National Bank of Australia (NAB) experienced a catastrophic failure that lasted 5 days due to a corrupted file on an IBM mainframe. Who’s to say if the issue was a system failure or a human error – in either case, the bank was down for 5 days. The good news is the failure was not at a U.S. bank which would have adversely affected the retails sales during Black Friday, the day after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday which is the biggest shopping day of the year for U.S. retailers. Good news??? Yeah –tell that to the Aussie trying to use their credit cards for the past 5 days.
A failure of this magnitude is bad enough, but consider what will start in just a few short weeks that may make news like this a more common occurrence.
Baby Boomers going bye-bye
The Baby Boomers are characterized as those individuals born in the post–World War II era from 1946 through 1964. Thanks for the history lesson, but so what? Well, starting on January 1, 2011, this mass of humanity will turn 65 years old and be eligible for retirement. For this population working in the IT industry, they inevitably cut their teeth on the mainframe and were instrumental in developing the processes and procedures to maintain/upgrade the mainframe. Just like Chuck Yeager, who first broke the speed of sound barrier, these people were pioneers in their fields…and they will begin retiring in greater numbers.
A bad combination
Combine a portfolio of legacy applications, an aging mainframe infrastructure and a retiring workforce - you are looking at a confluence of factors that may bring your business to a halt and affect the confidence of your customers for months or even years to come. There are other options.
Hop in, the water’s fine
Are you not ready for retirement, and want to leverage your mainframe skills in a growing and dynamic environment? The HP Instant-On Enterprise strategy has been designed to better address the rapidly changing needs of customers and citizens. One of the foundational integrated solutions is HP Converged Infrastructure, which is specifically engineered to provide the foundation for agile service delivery and drive down costs.
For more information visit:
www.hp.com/go/convergedinfrastructure
www.hp.com/go/instanton
