What happens when the IBM Director calls at 8 p.m. on a Saturday? That’s exactly what happened – and thanks to one colleague’s dedication, millions of people regained access to critical government services.
A critical public service system had gone down – border control, central residential login, everything. The root cause: a 10-year-old IBM XIV storage system, hosting nationally critical data. The real issue? There was no active support contract, despite multiple proposals from Syspro over the years.
Although this organization had been an IC client for many years, recent purchases had been made elsewhere, for political reasons. But when everything stopped, they didn’t call those vendors. They called the manufacturer. And the manufacturer called us. Because they knew where the real expertise was.
By 9:30 p.m., Attila Vas was on-site. He quickly identified not just a hardware failure, but several layers of accumulated issues – some made worse by earlier unsuccessful attempts to fix things. With real data loss on the table, we worked with the client to launch two parallel plans:
– Troubleshoot and recover the failed system,
– And in the meantime, deliver a 100 TB IBM v7000 from our own warehouse to allow immediate backup restoration.
By 11 p.m., the new storage system was installed and running. IBM’s international support team was also involved overnight, and after nearly 24 hours of work, the original device was brought back online with fully consistent data.
Attila worked in the server room from 9 p.m. Saturday until 4 p.m. Sunday. Truly the hero of the day.
The client was deeply grateful, and at executive level committed to rethinking their procurement strategy – with a clear intent to prioritize value-driven partners going forward.