DST arrives; time switch appears to have been smooth

Computerworld - The changeover to daylight-saving time (DST) in the U.S. arrived without major troubles for IT operations, as many staffers stayed up late last night to carefully monitor the time change in corporate data centers around the nation. According to reports from various companies, glitches were few -- and minor.

"We have uncovered a minor issue related to an internal log-viewing application using an embedded JRE version, which was not detected during the planning and testing," said Michael Leonhardt, an infrastructure architect at Building Materials Holding Corp. in San Francisco, referring to Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Java Runtime Environment. "Other than that, everything went smoothly."

IT workers at the building materials company will continue to monitor systems through the rest of the weekend to be sure that no other problems pop up, he said.

"If the situation does pass without major issues, the success should be wholly attributed to our IT teams," Leonhardt said. "Despite the lack of research and planning by the U.S. government in concert with the delays of obtaining patches from vendors, we are cautiously optimistic and have not yet seen any major internal issues arise due to the time change."

The efforts to get IT systems into compliance for the earlier DST change this year were significant, Leonhardt said, and they certainly took their toll. "It is unfortunate [that ] IT was required to stop work on business initiatives and projects to divert the necessary resources to deal with this reckless change," he said. "The costs to businesses associated with handling this change will probably never be recovered."

Online auction house uBid Inc., which relies on correct time stamps for its thousands of daily auctions and buy-it-now sales, experienced no IT-related problems this morning.

"We made it just fine through the daylight-saving time transition, and the world hasn't ended," Sally Dahl, vice-president of customer and seller operations at Chicago-based uBid, said in an e-mail. "At this point, we have no reports of any system or application issues."

Dahl attributed much of the success of her company's DST preparations to the upfront patching and maintenance work done by IT services firm Rimini Street Inc., which provides support for Oracle Corp.'s Siebel, PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards applications. Rimini is based in Las Vegas.

Seth Ravin, president and CEO of Rimini Street Inc., said in an e-mail early today that his company's "support lines have been quiet so far, with no reported DST issues from our clients.

"It is still early, but so far, we are having the 'non-event' we worked with our clients to achieve," he said. "We will continue standing by to assist clients as necessary with our 24/7 support but expect a quiet Sunday on the emergency support lines."