The cost of this failure will (at least initially) be borne by the users, and yet there was nothing they could have done to prevent it short of choosing another service or manually transcribing their details. People will miss appointments, lose business deals and in the most extreme cases could face extreme hardship as a result (for example, I’m guessing parole officers don’t take kindly to missed appointments with no contact!). Friends, family, acquaintances and loved ones-even (especially?) the boy/girl you met at the bar last night-may be gone for good. ![]() ![]() Whatever the root cause the result is the same-users who were given no choice but to store their contacts, calendars and other essential day-to-day data on Microsoft’s servers look like having irretrievably lost it. It’s hard to say with any real authority what is and what is not cloud computing though, beyond saying that “I know it when I see it, and this ain’t it”. This is in the same way that today’s aircraft are far safer than yesterday’s and today’s electricity grids far more reliable than earlier ones (Sidekick apparently predates Android & iPhone by some years after all). That is to say, the fact I see the term “SAN” appearing in the conversation suggests that this was a legacy architecture far more likely to fail. “Real” cloud storage systems transparently ensure that multiple copies of data are automatically maintained on different nodes, at least one of which is ideally geographically independent. It was a paid-for service too (~$20/month or $240/year?) which makes even the most expensive cloud offerings like Apple’s MobileMe look like a bargain (though if it’s any consolation the fact that the service was paid for rather than free may well come back to bite them by way of the inevitable class action lawsuits). As such there is no excuse whatsoever for not having reliable, off-line backups-particularly given Danger is owned by Microsoft (previously considered one of the “big 4” cloud companies even by myself). ![]() Note that while most cloud services exceed the capacity/cost ceiling of SANs and therefore employ cheaper horizontal scaling options (like the Google File System) this is, or should I say was, a relatively small amount of data. There’s plenty of theories as to what went wrong-the most credible being that a SAN upgrade was botched, possibly by a large outsourcing contractor, and that no backups were taken despite space being available (though presumably not on the same SAN!). This is an unfortunate and completely avoidable event that Microsoft’s Danger subsidiary and T-Mobile (along with the rest of the cloud computing community) will surely very soon come to regret. The cloud computing scandal of the week is looking like being the catastrophic loss of millions of Sidekick users’ data.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |