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By: Resilience Lessons from the Haiti Earthquake « Supply Chain Risk Research and Literature

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 21:53:33 +0000

[...] More on this topic can be found on this blog under “resilience“, or on Ken Simpson’s blog Contemplating…, particularly his most recent posts that summarizes some of his ponderings on resilience. [...]

By: Ken Simpson

Ken Simpson — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 04:34:47 +0000

Hi Wayne, thanks for dropping by and commenting.

The overall purpose of the discussions here are to explore how the concept of resilience is applied to organisations, their People, Process and Technology. Not just the technology.

In general the choice of hardware and operating system is not the level at which an entity would look to assess their level of resilience. From a technology perspective we would be concerned that there is appropriate levels of investment in availability and properly designed redundancy and service continuity.

I know that IBM promote that resilience is a product and you can order it from the price book - but it simply is not correct.

Try this post http://www.blog.vrg.net.au/continuityresilience... which talks about another company offering to sell resilience. Or this one http://www.blog.vrg.net.au/bc-practice/how-ofte...

Vendors do not sell solutions, only products and services. The client has to create the solution to the problem themselves.

Glad to hear you are still out there.

By: Wayne

Wayne — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 23:17:42 +0000

Are Windows server versions as resilient as other platforms ? (Im sure you expected this one from me when you sent the invitation to comment
Examining the points raised, they talk of “Mindfulness” and environmental awareness – Windows considers itself the be all and end all and doesn't make any attempt to interoperate with non-Windows environments. They talk of Reliability and Robustness – Windows is the most rebooted and easiest to break/most often broken platform currently in use. They mention “Vulnerablitity” as the opposite to resilience – Windows has more Vulnerabilities, Malware and Viruses than any other platform. They also mention functional agility – Windows is very stodgy and set in its ways, you usually dont have a choice but to do things the way Microsoft have thought of. An additional Characteristic that hasnt been mentioned is scalability – more commonly than not, Windows applications become unusable when they cant scale to meet an increasing workload and achieve acceptable performance (regardless of how much extra hardware and money you throw at it).
Resilience is a synonym for Enterprise Ready – its sad that some people think that Windows servers are Enterprise Ready.
Windows is often deployed for Enterprise applications because it is perceived as cheap to deploy, however it is almost as often found that the solution becomes more expensive than alternatives for larger workloads. Be careful when you aim for mediocrity as it is not the same as resilience. Note also that resilience and pervasiveness are two different things.