[geeks] What do you get paid for wearing a pager?

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Patrick Giagnocavo <patrick at zill.net>
>Date: 2006/09/24 Sun PM 10:34:52 CDT
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] What do you get paid for wearing a pager?

>> Kicker:  I need to respond within 15 minutes of a page.
>>
>
>I should have clarified this a little bit, in that the only reason for 
>a page is "the server is down".  Other issues don't result in me being 
>paged.
>
>However, all your comments are in fact making me think of the possible 
>downsides, and about what else could be wrong with such an agreement - 
>so thanks and keep the comments coming!

Patrick,

I've carried pagers that were accessible by end-users, but got almost no calls.

To "demand" 15 minute response time is aprox. the same response time they could expect when you are "on the clock" (at your desk). That level of availability is a full-time job, and almost requires three shifts of support personnel. To try and do it as a single person is a *huge* undertaking, and (IMHO) can not be over-priced.

If response time was 1 hour, that is much more manageable as a single support technician.

At Work-2 I sat in on some "disaster recovery planning" meetings with SunGuard and the business director was insisting that we have a hot site available to go on-line within 15 minutes of an emergency being declared.

We all jst looked at her dumbfounded.

We were an IVRS company (producing IVRS in support of CLinica Drug Trials), so we had not only internet connectivity, but telco demands as well as complete, accurate clinical trial database needs. We tried to explain to her that that was an unreasonable timeframe, she insisted our business demanded it. So we explained it to her. That would require redundant data center identical to the production environment we were then running, including duplicate phone lines (we had over 120 dial-in phone lines spread over T1s) and high-speed data links to ensure that *every* update to the production server was mirrored on the hot site servers before the transaction was closed. Oh, and since the proposed data center was more than 15 minutes away from our existing data center, we'd most likely need to have some minimal staffing at SunGuard around the clock.

It took her a few months to "get over" that requirement, and during those few months we had *no* plan in place, so if an error had struck, we were toast...

Moral of the story - it is typically ignorance that drives such demands from clients, and a little bit of education can go a long way towards a reasonable solution.

In your case, do you have a 15 minute response time commitment during working hours? If their need is as great as they percieve it, it is time to consider a backup server, laod balancer/re-director if primary machine goes down, and some other "auto-pilot" recovery methods to ensure theyr software/servers are available 24x7...

Lionel