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?"

Comments

AGPL

[Koohoolinn]

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/

causes of the meltdown

[viralMeme]

"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"

Re:Management

[pz]

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.