David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…This is a good one. This is in Dave's book. One of the guys—I think he was working on BASE I and then maybe got transferred into BASE II—is thinking about the system, and reliability is so important. This network can't go down. He's like, we actually have a pretty serious vulnerability in the system. He goes to see Dee. The whole Visa organization I think is less than 50 people at this point in time. It's just wild. He's like, Dee, all this technology we're building, we've got authorizations running, we're in the middle of getting settlement running, the whole Visa network now depends on this technology. We're providing the service off of one computer in one data center, which is made out of wood and sits on a hillside that has dried grass, right by a freeway, below a parking lot that is perched on a cliff. We're also about a mile from the San Andreas Fault. We really might want to think about having some redundant parallel site data center out there. It is very Dee way. He's like, all right, let me think about this over the weekend. He comes back on Monday and he's like, all right, you're right. thought about it, you now have a new job, your job is to solve this problem. Your marching orders, you are to go move somewhere on the East Coast, I don't care where, find a site where you can build a redundant data center, get it all built, and have it done within six months. And invent the technology to keep these things synchronized so they are actually redundant.…

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