In Reply to: Consequences of War posted by amadbruin on March 05, 2026 at 15:33:21
I believe that, back in the day, Walmart used IBM servers arranged in a ring similar to NORAD’s systems. The idea was the same: maintain functionality even after catastrophic failures. Just as NORAD was designed so the U.S. could still launch nuclear weapons even if parts of the country and command and control were destroyed, Walmart wanted to ensure it could keep processing payments even if some servers went down.
Today, most companies rely on cloud infrastructure. I remember laughing in college at how excessive Walmart’s redundancy seemed. But now the value of that kind of resilience is obvious. Imagine how much Amazon could lose if its systems were down for even an hour.