We recently had a major outage in our shop floor systems due to a SAN Outage. The outage was due to an outdated SAN hardware and the supporting components that were not even available with the vendor when the outage happened. ETA for restoration was 3 to 4 hours.
Rewind to Feb 2005 : Our team reviewed all critical systems and provided a recommendation for replacing the SAN on the shop floor. One of the business leaders rejected the idea with a comment that went as " This is nothing but an attempt by systems group to buy some new toys.. rejected ". Why fix something thats not broken.
System is back to normal, but during the RCA phase, the CFO blasted the recently anointed manufacturing leader/SVP. The new leader walked out of the session with CFO called a meeting of the systems group and said that heads are going to roll for not taking care of this and that some one would have to pay for this in the next 24 hours.
I had been using google desktop since beta and thought that it was time to put it through the much awaited litmus test. A quick Search for "Manufacturing Proposal" pulls up the email chain where the SVP himself rejected the idea of replacing the old hardware. ... Quietly forwarded an archive of the email chain to Director of IT and rested my case and thought to myself.. "Wonder who is going to pay for this .. atleast I am not.. "
