Texas sees IBM incapable of recovering lost data; takes away voter system from ~$1Bn project from IBM

88% o agencies survey were dissatisfied with IBM services. This is definitely not the only region IBM is having trouble. In EMEA IBM has lost several large accounts to competitors as there were irreconcilable differences and poor service that was being delivered by IBM.

Many APAC economies that opened up their budgets and got IBM/HP on their floor have not been that prudent in selecting carefully.

But the Secretary of State office tells the the Austin American-Statesman it received a “wake-up call” in August after a major server crash resulted in a 13-day outage of its business records filing system.

It infers that if a similar incident occurred during an election, the agency wouldn’t be able to verify new voters in Texas. The state agency received permission to withdrawal from the IBM program and set up a data center of its own with two separate backup locations.

An IBM spokesman told El Reg the outage was due to a failure with a third-party SAN it inherited from the Secretary of State office. Plans were in place to migrate that SAN to a new environment, he said.

“IBM worked closely with the Secretary of State’s office to correct a complex situation as quickly as possible,” he adds, claiming the systems were only intermittently down over the course of the remediation.

This is not the first time IBM has messed up Texas. In 2008, governor Perry suspended the transfer of state files to IBM systems and fined the company $900,000 for data lost through back-up failures under the same government contract.

Separately, another server crash in July 2008 for the state Attorney General’s Medicaid fraud unit caused a loss of half the records generated during an eight-month investigation period.

Source

Disclaimer: I will be writing a report on “State of Malaysia” where IBM and HP both have large contracts running.

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