[paulie_a]

Quality hardware has existed for years. At a ford motor plant they were doing an inventory and couldn't locate a 10 ton mainframe. It was working so well for 15 or so years the tribal knowledge of where it was physically located was lost.

[ansible]

Wow, that's impressive losing that big a piece of hardware.

Though it was likely easier to find than that Novell Netware server that was sealed behind some drywall, with only a stray network cable leaving any clue as to where it was.

[owenmarshall]

Depends on how big the building is that houses it – manufacturing IT can deal with impressive floor spaces.

I once only half jokingly suggested finding a missing data closet in a two million square foot distribution center by pinging a known IP from three or four aggregator switches across the building and triangulating the location on a floor plan. Sadly the people crawling around the ceiling found it before I could put my idea into practice.

[pbhjpbhj]

2Msqft is c.430m x 430m for a square floorplan. Ping resolution is 1us (microsecond). Speed of electrical signal in cooper is about 0.8c. Gives a max resolution of ~240m by my reckoning. If there are variances in the switch+network delay it seems like you're going to struggle to even say which side of the building it is.

Good job they found it!

[owenmarshall]

Hah! Good math. Based on the switch placement and the building being more of a rectangle I figured "north side or south side" would be as close as I could get. And when we really dug in it was a classic last mile problem: the first several core switches were well known, we just needed to figure out where the last aggregate switch went.

Turns out a door was closed and a new one built to a hallway to another hallway and not properly labeled on the updated drawings. Had one of the boxes running a conveyor belt not have died, we'd never have looked.

[Milank]

This is all true, but you still can't rely on increased hardware quality if you can't afford any downtime due to moving (a one-time event) a server.

Also, that doesn't cover other problems mentioned here, like natural disasters, ISP problems, etc.

[hnlmorg]

Often these kinds of SLAs are decided upon based on blame rather than what is reasonably required by the customers of that system. In this case, moving offices means the downtime is due to internal reasons. But if an ISP goes down or there is a natural disaster, then that isn't in their control.

Also cost does come in play as well. Multiple physical links in would be very expensive for what sounds like internal services. Likewise a natural disaster might cause bigger issues to the company than those internal services going down. They might still have offsite back ups (I'd hope they would!) so at least they can recover the services but the cost of having a live redundancy system off site might not justify those risk factors.

The customers requires are definitely unreasonable though. I'd hope those systems are regularly patched, in which case when is downtime for that scheduled and why is that acceptable but not when you're physically moving the server? I doesn't really make much sense; but then "not making much sense" also quite a common problem when providing IT services for others.

[Milank]

You are right, their SLA can be a bit different from what we're talking about here (and expect).

In general, we don't know much about this case. It's a post on Reddit, might not even be true. As is, it doesn't make much sense, but we don't know all the details, so maybe we jumped to conclusions.

[nuker]

> can't rely on increased hardware quality if you can't afford any downtime due to moving (a one-time event) a server.

Mainframe is not just a server. You can hot plug RAM on these things.