You get what you pay for...why blame the supplier when it is you who cut corners and compromise by not even having a hot stand by for mission critical systems like most other airlines do.

The joy of outsourcing!!!! You think an outage of data centre at the bottom of Nelson street (or could be Newton as i may be a bit out of date here) is bad, think what could happen if the mainframes are located in Bangalore. Air New Zealand deserves everything they get by outsourcing their critical IT infrastructure.

Let me give you a UPS-101 based on my experience working for an IT firm supplying UPS to Databank in AKL in the 80's (Present IBM set up may vary somewhat). Mainframes are powered from normal AC. When a power outage occurs, power is supplied via a bank of batteries with an inverter. When the batttery bank is drained below a certain threshold, standby diesel generator(s) kick in to supply charge to the battery bank until normal AC power is restored. This time, the diesel generator failed to kick in. This is what we are led to believe. In fact we don't know the true story.

I am baffled why no other IBM customers are affected. I know that there are a few financial institutions with their mainframes housed in the same IBM managed building. Obviously, we are not told the whole story.

Whatever the truth, the inescapable fact is that the business continuity plan of Air New Zealand left a lot to be desired. While Rob Fyfe is justified in blaming IBM, but that does not solve his problem. Finding another service provider is simply a case of a jilted lover transfering his affection to the next available but equally unsuitable candidate. Does he really think that HP ot EDS could do better?

Though I am no fan of Bill Gates, but for Bill Gates bashers, I hate to disappoint you. This time he is not to blame. What you see is front line staffs rebooting their PCs in desperate attempt to re-connect to DB2 at the back-end. Of cource, they failed as mainframes in Nelson Street (or Newton) are dead for the lack of electrons. You will get the same problem even if you run Mac OsX or Linux front-ends.

And for those who think Internet is the problem, I have news for you. Internet is NOT the problem. The problem is when you access AirNZ's website and their web servers pass your request to their application servers and their application servers package your requests and pass your requests to the backend DB2 and this is where the problem started because their backend DB2 was dead.

And for Larry Ellison worshippers, I hate to burst your bubbles. This has nothing to do with the DBMS you are using. Oracle DBMS won't perform any better than DB2 without electricity. I won't want to remind you what the ORACLE acronym stands for.

The lesson here is that if the IT infrastructure is critical to your business, you should own it as Steve of #22 and Rob Fyfe have discovered. This is not rocket science at all; just good business sense. It is not about the over-reliance on technology, but the failure to manage risks. Obviously, AirNZ IT hasn't thought this through. It is as simple as asking a few what-if questions. And how much are they paid for not knowing this?

Don't get me wrong, IBM is not blameless, but Air New Zealand deserves a black eye for not taking their destiny in their own hands. My advice to Rob Fyfe is not to direct his anger at IBM, but to channel his energy to ensure that AirNZ is in total of its own destiny. And that begins with its own IT infrastructure.

Rob Fyfe can tell me what companies of AirNZ's size can do without a robust IT infrastructure.

BTW, I think I recognise DOC of #29 from the 80's and I fully endorse his comment.

And for IT of #38, I do agree, but in this case, I do believe that IBM as the outsourcing partners should be doing the fail-over test. As the recent events have proved, AirNZ would be better off doing it themselves.

Did you know that Maurice Williamson once worked for IT of Air New Zealand?

Well there are New Zealand owned data centre alternatives with newer and more reliable centres.

The most important thing a datacentre must have is emergency power backup. In case of a power outage the UPS and emergency generator must kicked in. I think IBM has lost all credibility in this case!

Couldn't care less about Air NZ and IBM, probably wasn't anyone one persons fault. computers have melt downs all the time. you'd have to be living under a rock not to know that. Stuart Little is crack up What an awesome photo.

Between 1pm and 3pm, every single flight coming into Christchurch from Auckland appeared to be 90 - 120 minutes late. The flight I was waiting for was still showing as expected on time twenty minutes after that time - even though it didn't take off until an hour late.

So: Most people moved within an hour - looked like a lie to me. Kept well informed - ditto.

A to the B to the C. LOL BTW HAHA. Nothing like a geek story to get all the acronyms out there.....

Shoddy IBM service. Exactly what happens when IT staff are half a world away from the data centre and have no concept of the SLA. I hope the various "Managers" get their bonuses cut just as those at CBA did over service failures

We looked at the IBM Datacentre a couple of years ago and were not impressed one little bit, it is dated and not up to today's standards. Why Air New Zealand would trust in that data centre is a mystery.

As for Disaster Recovery, I would have assumed that on the scale of New Zealand network transactions that their CIO would have told the board about the risks of not having continuous failover to a hot site, if not then he has FAILED at doing his job and should accept resonsibility.

IBM are unfortunate a serious h/w failure happened at an inopportune time. However, Air NZ must take some responsibility for setting up a DR site with a rediculously limited budget, then going against expert advice by deciding to move all production systems to one location.