Posts Tagged ‘Link failures’

What happens when the hammer falls?

What’s the chance that you will be hit on the head with a hammer? What’s the probability that your data center will be hit by a major fire, a major flood, a hurricane, or an earthquake? Both are pretty low, right? If you are a disaster recovery professional, you’ve probably been asked at last once, “Why are you budgeting so much for disaster recovery, when these events are unlikely to happen?” Wouldn’t it be better to spend money on preventing or surviving things that happen frequently? Or better yet, wouldn’t it be better to spend money on things that will help the company grow? But just like a hammer to the head, big disasters can be very costly when they do happen. So we, as businesses, somewhat reluctantly, spend money trying to prevent those disasters that we can prevent and survive those that we can not prevent.

I was looking at some articles on the severity and frequency of accidents and found an interesting blog post by Bill Wilson who has worked in the nuclear power industry and writes about the prevention of industrial accidents. He wrote about Herbert William Heinrich, who worked for an American insurance company and published a book on the prevention of industrial accidents. His research found that for every fatal or severe accident, there were 29 minor injuries and 300 accidents that resulted in no injuries. He suggested that by eliminating the root cause of accidents that caused no injuries, companies could prevent most fatal accidents. The article shows how a dropped hammer can produce a wide range of results, from no injury to fatality, depending upon other circumstances around the dropped hammer, like whether someone was walking beneath the hammer and how high the hammer was when it dropped. But what is common to all of these events is that all injuries could be prevented by eliminating the dropping of the hammer.  It’s possible to imagine that all hammer dropping could be eliminated by tethering the hammer to the person carrying it.  When it comes to accident prevention, however, the problem with that approach is that the tether that prevents the dropped hammer does nothing to prevent the falling brick. Read the rest of this entry »