Flashback Friday: Failover? Well, he got the first half.

Spectacularly, as a matter of fact.

IT director at this big insurance company makes a big deal about how much money can be saved by consolidating virtual machines, reports a consultant pilot fish working there.

But fish isn’t so certain it’s a good idea. “Many of us said, ‘Are you sure about failover?’” says fish. “His response was basically, ‘Go away, kid, ya bother me.’

“We finally got all the work done, migrating applications and databases. We got a thank you. Director got promoted — he saved the company $10,000 per month.

“Six weeks after this project completed, the company’s websites — all customer-facing and team-facing access — crashed.

“After some research, it was discovered that the hosting company, under the director’s signature, had put all of the servers, primary and failover, in the same hardware frame, which had a power-supply failure. The company was offline for nearly 30 hours.

“But the director kept his promotion.”