So, the rumors of troubles ahead of last Sunday’s “One Million People Protest Rally” organised by the Opposition in Petaling Jaya is just a rumor. Maybe the poor turnout as what the deputy PM Najib proclaimed helped to contain the situation but nevertheless the spectators were given free “butt” entertainment. As what I’ve blogged not many moons ago, this time around people are not so “obsessed” with protest or demonstration despite the staggering 40.6 percent fuel hike because of the RM625 rebate. That’s human nature as people have yet to feel the pain in the long run and RM625 is a huge amount of money (at least to some) compare to the little extra they’ve forked out “so far”.
In a way the government was smart in giving out this little carrot or else I can’t imagine the possible havocs that could have erupted. Talk about havocs, it appears the stock market investors, traders, gamblers and speculators are still talking about last Friday’s embarrasing system failure. The crisis has also invited tons of speculations and jokes. Whether there was indeed hardware or software mulfunctions, the damage to the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange’s (Bursa Malaysia) reputation has been done. Some people nevertheless think the stock exchange has done a marvellous job in handling the crisis. Yeah right, as if their lame excuse of hard-disk failures was super-convincing.
As usual, the mentality of the Bursa’s CEO reflects certain degrees of Denial Syndrome disease when he was quick to say other stocks exchanges had failed before, without naming any of the past cases. CEO Yusli of course later said he is willing to bear the responsibility but did not go any further from the statement. It would be too much for him to resign, considering the country’s culture, but heads need to be rolled. Why not start with the head of IT (information technology)? The head of IT should know how critical the trading systems are and how such mission critical hardwares and softwares should be protected and made available 24×7. Furthermore the top IT management was paid handsomely in terms of bonus during the good time and now accountability needs to take its course.
And if the required systems availability couldn’t meet the SLA (service level agreement) agreed due to dependency, then let’s cross the IT border for more heads. With huge IT allocation, I don’t think Finance was stingy but if there was then you have more names in your list. How about Audit? Who are the committee members of the (DR) disaster recovery team? To declare that the DR works only when all the components fail but not when one component such as the stock trading system fails is an insult to our intelligence. Let’s think over it. If there’s any truth to it, then manually fail all the components in order for the so-called DR to kicks in so that “all the systems” can be failed over to the backup system. It’s either all or none at all.
But then the whole DR design is flawed, don’t you think? I bet Hewlett-Packard Co was the main contractor who designed the DR system so let’s cannabalise the company as well, shall we? Hmmm, I heard they have the obsolete Tandem system also. I also heard they’re running the world-class Symantec-Veritas Netbackup data protection softwares to protect the lifeblood of the data. So the backup data are basically useless I suppose. Why bother to backup then.
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July 8th, 2008 by financetwitter
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Comments
A friend of mine who used to work in Bursa told me that Bursa runs a backup routine every quarter, and the success rate of the backup is 25%, which means that for every back-up routine performed, 3 in 4 times the routine will fail.Even then, it’s considered lucky.
hello yowchuan,
i assume your friend was referring to “restore” instead of backup in their routine test to ascertain data can be recovered after being backup …
as the saying goes, backup will most likely work but not necessarily recoverable …
but success rate of 25% is definitely disastrous … scrap the stupid symantec veritas backup software … i understand that the vendor (not HP) who supplied the software made huge amounts of money from the product as well as annual maintenance, not to mention the jack-up price for the licenses …
cheers …
hello yowchuan,i assume your friend was referring to “restore” instead of backup in their routine test to ascertain data can be recovered after being backup …as the saying goes, backup will most likely work but not necessarily recoverable …but success rate of 25% is definitely disastrous … scrap the stupid symantec veritas backup software … i understand that the vendor (not HP) who supplied the software made huge amounts of money from the product as well as annual maintenance, not to mention the jack-up price for the licenses …cheers …
A friend of mine who used to work in Bursa told me that Bursa runs a backup routine every quarter, and the success rate of the backup is 25%, which means that for every back-up routine performed, 3 in 4 times the routine will fail.
Even then, it’s considered lucky.