Hot Swap, How Sweet

Inevitable, isn't it? The day before leaving on a 6-day business trip, one of the hard drives on one of our production servers degrades to the point of failure. In addition, just last week I was boasting to our company President how our servers never break down or need service.

But as we dug a little deeper, we discovered our server was still under warranty, that the vendor would courier a replacement hard drive by tomorrow, that our network consultant would be able to be on-site to install the drive, and that the drive was hot swappable. Now that is truly sweet. The defective drive gets removed and replaced without interrupting production at all. Nobody even knows that we were on thin ice!

It wasn't that long ago that the technology supporting this kind of feature was prohibitively expensive. Today it is virtually commonplace in most servers. So the potential IT nightmare becomes, in reality, a lullaby and sweet dreams.