The very real difficulties in keeping virtual services running
In the last few months, we’ve all seen various providers and services have problems.
http://url.ie/8xh documents a long list of infrastructure issues with some ‘big name’ hosts, some of whom market their ‘zero downtime’ networks – you can see our own status site for an issue we experienced this week – http://www.hosting365status.com – and more recently Amazon S3/EC2 suffered an outage – http://url.ie/97n
Personally, I hate seeing providers in trouble. I’ve been through the same, I know how it feels and it’s not pleasant. You stress, worry, fret and get not a little angry after having planned, invested, planned more, invested (a lot) more and then planned some more and yet still things go wrong.
Professionally though, I am delighted when issues like these happen. Not because I am some kind of masochist, nor do I get pleasure from another providers problems, but because it helps educate the customer.
Customers want 100% uptime of hardware, networks, datacentre, chillers, staff, they want 5 minute responses to their questions 24/7 and they want it all for less than most of them pay for advertising the service they are running online.
This isn’t a rant, I’m not saying ‘customers’ are dumb’, I guess I’m just reiterating the one truism in this business;
- stuff breaks
No matter what you spend, how much you plan or how good your staff (inhouse or outsourced) are, there is no getting away from that fact.
You can invest in multi-site, cloud based, real-time-replicated systems, and reduce your risk of exposure to tiny percentages, but, as Amazon just found out, a simple software glitch can happily replicate itself and upset those plans.
Service providers can certainly do their part. Hosting365.com is about to launch our new ‘Cloud’ Platform, which offers a huge grid of computing and storage, built on world-class HP Blades and SAN, running a super resilient Cisco network and leveraging the best in class virtualisation technologies HP and VMware have to offer. With offsite replicated DNS and load balancing, and multiple ‘clouds’ in multiple datacentres on separate networks, we are getting close to that 100% target – and are doing it at a price point that doesn’t break the bank. Customers need to also review their own continuity plans – do you have backups for the backups of the backups?