This big bank has its DR/BCP systems located across the river, and it decides to move the IT portion from one city to another several miles away, says pilot fish. The vendor in charge of this move says it’s going to take a few months to get the new comms lines up, and then it will order a new set of servers for the new site, and then it will set them up — all of which will take a few more months.

Once the lines are in, fish has friendly chat with a systems engineer at the vendor, a take-charge type of guy. They conspire to meet at the old site, where they disconnect servers and cart them down to the engineer’s own car. Once it’s loaded to the ceiling, they head off to the new site. There, they cart it all up to the new DR cage and hook it all up to the new lines. The engineer logs in, makes IP address adjustments, and soon the bank has one of its two backup systems up and running in the new location.

Within a few more days, they repeat, and now both are up and running — months ahead of the vendor’s schedule.

This is where Shark Tank fans expect the other shoe to drop: Corporate chains of command have been ignored, heads will roll, that sort of thing. And maybe that would have happened, but a few days later, there’s a failure in one of the bank’s primary systems. And no one particularly noticed, because the new setup had a working hot backup for the primary systems.

Notes fish, the equipment in the old DR site had never been fully hooked up and tested, so it was the first time in a long time that they had a working hot backup.

Says fish: “It didn’t just feel good that we had this done just in time to prevent an outage. It was a real victory for the two of us over the bureaucracy!”

Sharky wants to load his car to the ceiling with your true tales of IT life. Send them to me at sharky@computerworld.com. You can also subscribe to the Daily Shark Newsletter.