- Thursday, 26 November 2009
- INQ Mobile
- RSS
Litigation is a machine which you go into as a pig and come out as a sausage - Ambrose Bierce, allegedly
Danger no backups
HACKS SPENT the weekend running around looking for a cause to Microsoft's outage that left many T-Mobile Sidekick users without access to their calendar, address book, and other key data.
Outages happen all the time, but this one was particularly bad because the Vole has been trying to tell the world plus dog that it is perfectly safe to stuff data onto the cloud. Sidekick keeps nearly all of its users' data in the cloud as opposed to keeping the primary copies on the devices themselves.
To make matters worse, the Vole admitted that data not recovered thus far may be permanently lost. It is not clear how many people that will harm.
Microsoft has a problem in that it is just about to launch Azure, its operating system in the cloud. Software written for Azure will run only at Microsoft's data centres and not on a company's own servers.
To be fair to the Vole, the 'Danger' system that was powering the Sidekick fiasco is not the same as Azure. However all the data was still hosted in Microsoft's data centres which have been sold as a secure places for storing data.
The Vole bought Danger last year and it has been assuring everyone that its Azure service is built with more redundancy. For a file to be lost, Microsoft will have to lose an entire data centre, it claims.
Later in the weekend cracks in the Vole's story were starting to appear. Hacks have now started to point to a hardware failure in Microsoft's cloud.
Engadget said that the Vole outsourced an upgrade of its Sidekick storage area network (SAN) to Hitachi, which did not make a backup before it started.
The upgrade went pear shaped and all the data was lost. When the Vole asked where the backup was, Hitachi engineers suddenly remembered something important that had to be done across town.
People expect that the road to Redmond will soon be lined with crucified Hitachi and Microsoft engineers who were involved in the situation.
Coming at a moment when the whole cloud computing thing needs considerable faith on the part of IT managers, something like this could let the Vole's whole marketing department down.
The fact that Google has had a few problems with its own cloud applications will bring Microsoft little comfort. Cloud computing is new technology and if it is regarded as unreliable then it will not happen. µ
Share this:
ShareBusiness Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
Microsoft will probably blame the poor Hitachi technician who stuck his screwdriver into the back of the rack.
T-Mobile's reputation has also been battered by this. Some have blamed T-Mobile, who put out the announcement that everyone's data might be lost (shoot the messenger).
You know who I blame? I blame The Vole. It's The Vole's fault, and only The Vole's fault that there was no back-up.
It's been a Volish week, really. I've had no end of entertainment reading all the bad reviews of Windows Mobile 6.5, complete with 1997 stylus interface. It had me in fits of laughter.
Then the Vole released it's 'MyPhone' data back-up service for Windows Mobile. Just as the Vole switched on 'MyPhone', the Sidekick server collapsed in a puff of smoke, without any backup.
I think the Vole will quietly skulk away and pretend that nothing happened.
Service interruptions I can understand, but dataloss????? I will definately NOT be trusting them with my data any tiem soon.
Sounds like Microsoft was cutting corners and using one large SAN for data storage and backup. No matter what Hitachi was doing, Microsoft should have had all the data replicated to another SAN, preferably at another location. Yes this may cost a lot more but it's just the cost of doing business. Don't offer a cheap option because it's not competitive. If you can't do it properly don't do it at all.
If I did decide to store valuable data on some company's computers, I most emphatically would not choose Microsoft. After all, it is responsible for Windows - not the highest-quality piece of software I have ever worked with.
I'd probably think of IBM first. It has a 50-year track record of safeguarding vast amounts of business-critical data and has a deep understanding of all the relevant factors. (And no, I don't have any relationship whatever with IBM, other than admiring its considerable strengths and being quite critical of its complementary weaknesses).
But any company that has quality and reliability high on its list of priorities would be better than Microsoft. Its priorities are well known to be profit, market share, profit, revenue, profit, and profit - in that order. Not much room for quality or concern for customers' interest left in there!
Who in their right mind would name a product/system "Danger" ?
"Who in their right mind would name a product/system "Danger" ?"
Somebody with a sense of reality, perhaps?
Cloud isn't "everything stuck in one datacentre". The "cloud" has been taken over as a marketing name by corporations to sell their datacentre services.
Cloud was supposed to be thousands of ordinary computing devices (whether they be PCs or mobile phones) on a general network, all hosting and exchanging data for each other for redundancy and availability.
Instead, companies have come in and stolen the name, and you're stuck with the same old limitations of datacenters from a decade ago.
Not too long ago Microsoft purged customer data with their broken Windows Home Server. The took a year to fix that. I'd call that attitude careless.
We use Linux and Solaris for most of our servers. There are only a few Windows servers left. Thank God!
Backup, backup, backup. He who doesn't is just plain foolish. To put 100% trust in a cloud service will never a good idea. All things break sooner or later and if you lost data because you didn't maintain copies or some sort of backup, well, I guess you know better now.
And oh yeah, if you have all your personal data and other stuff important to you on a single hard drive at home, you need to take a lesson. You're going to lose all that one day.
It’s very difficult to back up a Microsoft OS. You need special “ghosting” tools—you can’t just do straight file copies with an off-the-shelf tool like rsync, the way you can on a Unix/Linux system.
I know what you’re thinking—isn’t the OS a separate thing from user data? It is on a rationally-designed OS, where you can backup and restore one without touching the other. Unfortunately that’s not true of Microsoft OSes.
RMS warned that people were putting personal & business data on proprietary services that won't even let you backup your own data.
RMS warned that it was only a matter of time before one of these systems that didn't allow people to copy their own data failed.
RMS warned that it may take a long time or that you might not ever get your data back.
RMS warned that it could be a personal inconvenience and that it could even put you out of business.
Think. There's a huge difference between Valve mapping 10,000 part time video game servers with Steam and putting the fate of your entire business into the blundering hands of some outsourced contractor's sub-contractor's guy's neighbor's kid or whoever eventually ends up sticking a screwdriver into the beating heart of your business.
Would Microsoft or Google let you hold all their data?
No. That's how companies go out of business.
I will never trust any "cloud" thingy with my important, or personal, data. Especially not Microsoft.
On top of that, Microsoft has quite a track record of losing people's data, so this time is just another line in the list.
And in any case, once a provider loses my stuff, you can be sure that I'll never trust it again.
But don't worry, Ballmer, your reputation is intact as far as I'm concerned - it's still as low as it can get.