Thousands must return to Va. DMV
Thousands of people who applied for a driver's license or identification card at the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles will have to return because of a government computer outage.
Photographs taken on Aug. 25 could not be recovered because of the outage. As a result, more than 4,000 licenses or identification cards processed that day were not mailed out.
The DMV is sending letters to applicants asking them to return for a new photograph.
The outage was caused by a hardware malfunction at the state's data center near Richmond, resulting in about 228 storage servers, maintained by Northrop Grumman Corp. as part of the largest contract in the state's history, to go off-line. The database was restored Thursday.
--Kafia Hosh
By
Kafia Hosh
| September 7, 2010; 5:17 PM ET
Categories:
Commuting, Driving, Northern Virginia, Virginia
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Posted by: blasmaic | September 7, 2010 8:26 PM | Report abuse
As something that is used state-wide it is inconceiveable that a company like Northrop Grumman would have a single point of failure on a such a system. One of the most critical component, the database, should have been replicated in real time. This is nothing new. Modern storage systems, while huge, have this capability already built-in. The ONLY reason not to provide redundancy is cost. Taxpayers in Virgina will be getting a new bill from Northrop Grumman soon to provide this redundancy.
Posted by: Jimof1913 | September 8, 2010 8:50 AM | Report abuse
I hope that the thousands will find plenty of homemade cookies upon their return to the DMV. What a pain.
Posted by: DOEJN | September 8, 2010 5:51 PM | Report abuse
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