The redundancy that most major retail chains have isn't that sophisticated. I
worked on site systems for Target and K-Mart some years back, and this was the
gist of what they did:
POS (point of sale) systems loaded their data in real time to a local server.
The local server used a RAID 5 array for data security. At a pre-detemined
time every day, the server uploaded the store data (inventory, sales, etc.) via
a satellite link.
The only hitch in this approach was if you missed your window of time for
tranmission to the satellite, as the times were tightly controlled from
corporate and had little room for mistakes. That necessistated calling
corporate to schedule a manual upload, or a dump of the data to tape, which was
overnighted to corporate.
I'm sure it's far more sophisticated than this now, as at the time I was
doing it there was no such thing as broadband or fiber, only DSL. And while it
did exist, I never heard of anyone having a dedicated T1 line in their store.
It's my understanding from what I see in trade rags that places like Wal-Mart
are doing real-time inventory, and generating orders directly from this data
without any human interaction.
Amazing, I guess.
Another aspect of redundancy that Publix recently grappled with was the loss
of power and resulting loss of perishables during extended outages (like during
and immediately following hurricanes.) They went on a major upgrade spree at
many of their stores and installed generators capable of carrying the
refrigeration load, which is substantial. They already had smaller gensets for
egress lighting and data backup, but they were way too small to deal with the
refrigeration loads.
The Publix closest to my house now has a 300kW Caterpillar in an enclosure
right next to the 50kW Onan that was already there.
Dan
Bill R <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
As a testament to what Don said, a few years ago I asked a friend who worked
at Publix [major Florida based grocery chain] about the new building going
up a the back of an area near where he worked. He said an internal study
showed that a computer system failure would most likely cause the company
and it's hundreds of stores to end up bankrupt. They were constructing a
fully redundant system in a separate location. The more you need a computer
system the more you need good protection and backup.
BillR
Formerly living in Lakeland FL, headquarters of Publix.
---------------------------------
Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now.
_______________________________________
http://www.okiebenz.com
For new parts see official list sponsor: http://www.buymbparts.com/
For used parts email [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to:
http://okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
