The commonwealth of Virginia experienced an information technology storage area network outage on August 25th 2010. This affected several agencies and caused 13% of the file servers to fail. The failure mainly impacted the Department of Motor Vehicles and Department of taxation. Because of the outage problem, DMV couldn’t process driver’s licenses and couldn’t share data with other agencies. (1) DMV has been unable to process in-person driver’s licenses or ID cards at its 74 customer service centers. The root cause of the failure was identified as the memory card of the EMC DMX-3 SAN array. Even though the primary cause of the failure was the SAN array, the database …show more content…
Due to the outage, DMV has to work overtime on the Labor Day weekend and it costed them around $1.2 million. DMV also paid the employees who worked overtime, one and half time plus the supplemental pay of $250 for Saturday full day and $125 for half day on Sunday and Labor Day. DMV spent about an average of $400 per hour to run each of its customer service center. (3)The Virginia Government requested Northrop Grumman to conduct an independent third-party audit to find the cause of failure. An audit was performed by Agilysys and it costed $250,000 for Northrop Grumman. …show more content…
Based on Agilysys suggestion Northrop Grumman agree to implement new technology to protect the state’s data, for the cost of $750,000. The SLA credit 2million dollars were shared with other agencies while it costed DMV $1.2 Million. The cost of downtime incurred for the other agencies that share the data with DMV and the inconvenience caused for the public cannot be determined easily .The incident also spoiled the reputation of the agencies and Northrop Grumman in general. From our understanding Northrop Grumman the cost was negligible to recover its reputation. On the other end, the system failure greatly helped the agencies to define the future SLA and also what to expect from the service providers to protecting its IT environment, data and public