Today one of my co-workers was victim of a major problem on the dutch railway service from and to Amsterdam; he came almost 2 hours late at office because of a ‘computer malfunction’ which resulted in the signaling and switches wouldn’t work. Apparently the computer that is responsible for dealing with these systems suffered a hard disk crash.
Dutch readers, check nu.nl for the story.
What strikes me is, that a computer system, which plays such an important role in the dutch railways infrastructure is vulnerable to such a simple thing as a hard disk failure. There are perfectly reliable and affordable ways to prevent such problems, by organizing redundant systems and featuring them with RAID storage. I really do not understand why ProRail (the maintainer of the rail network) allows single points of failure on such critical systems.
It baffles me that in this day and age thousand of commuters are still victimized by something that could have been prevented by relatively cheap technological solutions.
I realise that the official statement might have been over-simplified for the common commuter to it being a ‘hard disk crash’. This does not change the fact however that you can have good fail-over systems and disaster recovery procedures.
This has not been an isolated incident but seems to be a structural problem. I really believe that if they would put in the effort and investment they could have sorted this problem years ago.