AS/400 Survives Fire and Dousing at Toy Company

Published: Month 22, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

There are a couple of things that most companies do not want to talk about, and they include crimes perpetrated on their firms and any disasters that befall their offices that might knock out their computer systems and therefore their ability to conduct business.

In a recent story on disaster recovery planning in the British newspaper The Guardian, entitled Unlucky for Some, Preventable for All, toy maker James Galt was profiled as a case study for disaster recovery services from SunGard. It has been almost three years since someone was suspected of committing arson and the 150-year-old toy maker's offices were torched, so the company now feels comfortable talking about what happened. The interesting bit of the story is that the fire gutted the office space, and when the IT manager went into the building to recover any computer equipment, "this included one of the AS/400 servers, which miraculously survived the blaze and the subsequent dousing by the attending fire crews." It took the company 13 weeks to find new offices to put that AS/400 into.

American Idol. Survivor. AS/400.