They are hosted at the old Abovenet “Colo” and their version of a crash cart is a stethoscope and a few minutes of pounding a fist, combined with compression to get a pulse....
That physical site is where many people start but, when they grow up they move into virtualization beeeeeecuz, if a HD or RAID goes down, you always have an image you can drop onto another HD or into a RAID.
Of course it really isn’t likely an entire RAID will blow but, a single HD will FK things up, if you are still using 10 year old pizza boxes and getting anything from Fry’s.
Fry’s is famous for using RMA’s as their stock and if you look at the labeling on the box you can see if it is original or RMA.
Still, If JR and JR are going to keep everything in Paleo World Abovenet, they should keep some hot swappables they have tested instead of relying on those dorks at Fry’s, who don’t know Shiite about nothing and are their only really job is to push a device without regard to effect.
My dos centavos.
Personally, I’d VM on the cloud and go geo redundant and keep an image in my pizza box at Abovenet.
If Amazon, Level3 or any number of VM hosters were to go down then you would be on a completely different Class C or higher and a totally different provider peered to any other Tier 1.
But, it’s JR’s house and he duz whuz he wants...
I don’t believe that John is making backups. Even if the data center had been hit by a nuke, it would not have taken more than a day to do a bare metal restore from backup onto new hardware. Also, I suspect that none of the machines in question are running RAID. I have individual drives fail from time to time in servers and it’s no big deal—all are hot-swappable and it’s just a matter of plugging in a new drive and telling the array to rebuild—no downtime required.