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The Sidekick Failure and Cloud Culpability
miller60 writes "There's a vigorous debate among cloud pundits about whether the apparent loss of all Sidekick users' data is a reflection on the trustworthiness of cloud computing or simply another cautionary tale about poor backup practices. InformationWeek calls the incident 'a code red cloud disaster.' But some cloud technologists insist data center failures are not cloud failures. Is this distinction meaningful? Or does the cloud movement bear the burden of fuzzy definitions in assessing its shortcomings as well as its promise?"
This is an unforeseen hole in the bulletproof Gandhi mechanism, so I foresee a quick "GPL V3.1" to close this.
It already exists. It is called AGPL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGPL/
Deze sig is in 't Nederlands geschreven.
It's called Affero GPL
A single data center apparently without even a geographically distinct failover site is about as far as I can imagine from being a "cloud". Old fashioned best practices in the form of having two or more sites each capable of handling the entire load would have prevented this particular mess, let alone classic cloud approaches like that of the Google File System (GFS) which keeps at least three copies of a file's contents.
(Granted, if you're storing vital stuff in GFS or Amazon S3 you still have a logical single point of failure (e.g. a mistaken delete command) and therefore you aren't freed from the duty of doing your own backups, but that's a separate issue.)
Or we could just say that trusting Microsoft for anything is relatively unwise compared to other "higher tier" companies. Or that if you're depending on a service provider that's massively laying off staff you need to take action before something seriously ugly happens, because it likely will.
"According to some reports, the failure was due to a SAN (Storage Area Network) gone wrong at Microsoft's end. It is claimed that Microsoft does not have a working backup of some of the data that has gone missing from customers devices. The SAN upgrade is rumoured to have been outsourced to Hitachi to complete"
"Microsoft, possibly trying to compensate for lost and / or laid-off Danger employees, outsources an upgrade of its Sidekick SAN to Hitachi, which -- for reasons unknown -- fails to make a backup before starting"
There's no magic. All we're seeing is stupid people getting burned because they didn't use basic due diligence.
Yes, and, no. The people getting burned here are customers, by the many thousands. You can't expect the end-user to know what the DRP / BCP is for a subcontractor of the provider of their wireless communicator data plan. I wouldn't call the end-users stupid, and they are the ones most significantly affected in this case.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Blackberry data flows through RIM servers, but does not reside there.
Daniel Dilger on Roughly Drafted is speculating that it's an inside job.
Help stamp out iliturcy.