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The Sidekick Failure and Cloud Culpability

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the lowered-expectations dept.

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?"

2 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. AGPL by Koohoolinn · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  2. causes of the meltdown by viralMeme · · Score: 4, Informative

    "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"