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

Management

[FredFredrickson]

It's usually a decision on management's side to not use best practices, despite warnings from the tech dept.

tldr; There's nothing wrong with the technology, just the greedy bastards using it.

Re:Management

[sopssa]

As always, cloud computing/hosting/whatever is a vague term used like any other buzz term. I just see it as a platform where the resources should be allocated automatically and the underneath system takes care of having those available.

The same failure points are there. You're just putting the trust and management to someone else. Even if they do have backup plans and certain levels of redundancy, it can always fail. Cloud computing isn't something magical.

“Similarly datacenters fail, get disconnected, overheat, flood, burn to the ground and so on, but these events should not cause any more than a minor interruption for end users. Otherwise how are they different from ‘legacy’ web applications?”

That's because they aren't. The system is just managed by someone else, and its managed for thousands of people at the same time so its cheaper. Kind of like what Akamai has been doing for long with their content delivery network - it's cheaper for the providers because they dont have to build the infrastructure themself, and its cheaper for Akamai because they do it for so many clients.

Re:Management

[Splab]

Well there is one difference. Cloud computing and virtual servers are to computers what keychains are to keys, it enables you to lose everything at once.

Yes it is highly convienient and more effective to have everything in one place, but so much more fun when you drop your "chain" in the sewer.

Re:Management

[dkf]

Well there is one difference. Cloud computing and virtual servers are to computers what keychains are to keys, it enables you to lose everything at once.

It's not really a difference. With home-grown datacenters you still have that risk unless you do something like building multiple redundant buildings in different locales and managing some kind of replication and backup strategy. But then all of that stuff is the same with going to a Cloud provider, except you're not having to futz around with the physical facilities yourself.

There's no magic. All we're seeing is stupid people getting burned because they didn't use basic due diligence.

Re:Management

[dFaust]

But if Akamai loses a server, I don't have to repopulate the gigs of data they're hosting for me - it's not lost, it's just no longer on that particular server that died. That's exactly why I consider Akamai to be "the cloud" and why it doesn't side like Danger was. Especially with an infrastructure like Akamai or Google where things are geographically distributed, you just don't hear about servers dying, and you might not even hear about data centers dying (unless it places an unusually high burden somewhere and causes performance issues - but you don't hear about data loss as a result).

Re:Management

[Anonymous Coward]

Except the problem here is that when a large service goes down in the Cloud, millions of people can be affected.

For example, what if Google has their way with universities integrating with their system (Docs, Gmail, etc.) and Google has the sort of problems this Sidekick failure does? Now not just one university (if they own data center) has lost all of its hosted data, but any university relying on Google is out all the data hosted on the Cloud.

Re:Management

[QuantumRiff]

True, but how much more money and brain power does Google have to invest in datacenter design and disaster recovery than your local college?

Seriously.. I worked at one.. All our stuff was on "next day parts" from Dell.. We had a single internet connection to the campus, single linux based sendmail email server, etc.

Granted, I had tapes up the wazoo, and could retrieve any file for the past X years, but downtime is still downtime.

Then you have Google, with multiple sites, multiple connections, replication, Load balancers, etc.

Not only do they have more to invest, but when they call up a vendor and say "we are Google, we have an outage, and we need some things from you" I bet those vendors jump a little faster than when a local school IT guy calls them up..

Re:Management

[wickerprints]

To be fair, Sidekick users didn't have a viable means to back up their personal data that was being pulled from Microsoft/Danger servers. I don't think it's reasonable to expect the users to find some hack or unofficial method to copy all their data from their devices. The only blame they could be assigned is that they bought the service being sold. Your criticism would be valid for, say, iPhone users, since the user has a backup stored on their computer. But no such functionality exists for the Sidekick, as far as I am aware.

And as to who is really being burned here.... Obviously not Microsoft/Danger. Microsoft doesn't give two shits about this, since their acquisition of Danger in 2008 was really about cannibalizing their talent for Windows Mobile 7, as the Pink project has shown. Danger is just a shell of its former self--the damage was done long before this latest failure, which I think was an inevitable consequence of the acquisition. The ones who got burned are T-Mobile (for trusting Microsoft to manage Danger, and Danger to maintain a proper backup solution), and of course, the consumers.

The real issue, of course, is that data is always at risk of being lost no matter how, where, or in what amount it is stored. The passage of time guarantees it. But people want to believe in the existence of certainties, in the notion that if something has a 99.9999% reliability, then we can effectively ignore the minuscule probability of failure. But failures happen all the time and there is no such guarantee. We need to rid ourselves of this delusion that data can somehow be made "safe," that risk can be ignored when made small. Cloud computing is just the flavor of the day.

I knew someone who worked at Danger years ago when the company was still fairly new. It was, at the time, an amazing technology. There was nothing like it. They had so much going for them, and there was a lot of good talent working there. One thing that impressed me was how they solved the problem of mobile web browsing. At the time, mobile web browsing seriously sucked ass. It was not only slow, but many sites simply would not load. Danger solved that by re-parsing the sites on their servers so that pages would look good and function properly on your mobile device. It was the best solution until mobile OSes and hardware became powerful and complex enough to support full browsing; and even then, the UI needed to be tightly integrated before browsing became efficient instead of tedious. It's sad to see such a pioneering company wither on the vine.

Re:Management

[StuartHankins]

To be fair, Sidekick users didn't have a viable means to back up their personal data that was being pulled from Microsoft/Danger servers. I don't think it's reasonable to expect the users to find some hack or unofficial method to copy all their data from their devices.

Absolutely correct. Wish I had mod points.

Re:Management

[BrokenHalo]

This all comes back to the thrust of the OP: 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.

The simple truth, of course, is that it is both. And the only solution here is the old one: if you want something done properly, you will have to do it yourself. If your data, documents or whatever are in any way important to you, you should not be relying on anyone else to keep them safe. Simple as that, and no excuses.

Re:Management

[Eskarel]

That's really a rather idiotic statement.

If your data is important then you take it's storage seriously. Sometimes that means you host it yourself, sometimes it means you get someone else to host it for you. You don't host your critical data if you can't afford the staff and infrastructure to support it, and if you've already got the staff and infrastructure you don't pay someone else to do it.

The important thing is that you take it seriously. That means contracts with your data storage provider with exactly what backup and restoration services they're promising and penalties for failing to meet those promises. It means full disaster recovery plans and proper due diligence including understanding what kind of outages you can afford and what it's going to cost you to keep outages under that value.

There's nothing inherently more safe about storing your own data or inherently unsafe about having someone else do it. In most cases the person who stores the data and the person who actually needs it are different anyway. What is unsafe is trusting someone else to look after your data without checking up that they actually are, be they internal or external.

Re:Management

[sexconker]

I don't know about you, but I keep all my keys in a safe.

When I go out, I open up the safe (which has it's own key), and then take only the keys I'll need for my outing.

I keep them loose, in my various pockets.

When I return, I return the keys.

One time I locked the key to the safe inside the safe itself.

What a day that was.

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.

Re:Management

[Anonymous Coward]

Although I agree to some extent with your argument, the fact remains that it sure didn't work out in this case!

Sometimes a company will so thoroughly fall in love with the savings of server consolidation, they fail to implement (and especially TEST) their nifty backup and failover infrastructure. You might think that a company that SELLS cloud-style services would be at the forefront of robust testing. Evidently not in this case. Competent datacenter sysadmins are an endangered species.

Sidekick users would have been better off with self-service USB backup to a laptop. Even if some of them neglected or screwed up their backups, the would have (at worst) the same scenario they have now. There is something to be said for being in charge of your own destiny.

This is the problem I have with outsourced cloud-style services. Because so much risk has been consolidated into a single service provider, they either run a spectactular operation or they fake it until disaster strikes. In the end, there is no guarantee that what they do will perform any better than a homebuilt Linux box.

Re:Management

[mcrbids]

Don't confuse downtime (EG server powered down) with a catastrophic failure like this one. (total, irretrievable data loss)

Your school was a far better place (apparently) than MS Danger. Although downtime was more likely with your single sendmail server, you would still expect about 99.9% to 99.99% uptime year on year. that equates to about 4 hours per year on average. That's definitely down in the 'minor inconvenience' range for a school.

And your risk of catastrophic failure with all the (verified?) tapes is near zero. Sounds like a good solution to me!

The problems with outsourcing

[davidwr]

If you can't trust your outsourcing partner, replace them or bring the work in-house.

Re:The problems with outsourcing

[postbigbang]

Trust? All that data's gone without much chance of it being recovered, as in bye-bye.

Do you think that perhaps T-Mobile, or their "trusted partners" might have had a full backup (an IT 101 sort of plan), a mirror or highly available machine (an IT 201 sort of plan), a disaster plan (IT 301), or maybe just an encrypted torrent out there somewhere?

No.

Heads oughta roll. Cloud computing is only as good as you make it; it only represents a server outside of your office's NOC or physical boundaries. Nothing else is guaranteed. In this case, it was a service running on somebody else's host (and not properly done) and so it's not a matter of doubting the cloud, it's a matter of firing an incompetent vendor, then getting ready for the barrage of litigation and shame. Stupid stupid stupid. Put a bell on these guy's necks. I don't want them around me.

Re:The problems with outsourcing

[symbolset]

Daniel Dilger on Roughly Drafted is speculating that it's an inside job.

For the love of God the company is called "Danger"

[syntap]

Didn't that throw up any red flags for ANYONE?

Wrong story

[davidwr]

This belongs in the BSA story. At least there it might be modded insightful or funny.

Re:For the love of God the company is called "Dang

[Sockatume]

I thought the same thing about "Microsoft".

Okay guys, that joke's done, let's get on with our lives.

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/

Has there never been a non-cloud data loss?

[iamacat]

Just like people lose their stuff on personal hard drives when not backed up, they will lose cloud data when not backed up. Both kinds of computing have merits, and long term persistence of data is not automatic with either. Most people do not place THAT hard a value on backups of their cell phones. They typically sync with a PC anyway. But any business that doesn't have weekly reliable offsite backups of their fundamental assets should be sued by shareholders/customers for irresponsibility weather they use cloud or not.

Re:Has there never been a non-cloud data loss?

[John Whitley]

Heck, I know folks who've lost entire well-known (hobbyist) web-portals some years back due to provider server failures. It was a harsh lesson for those involved. So much for the provider's backup policies. The real solution is to have multiple copies of the data, ideally in different formats. For example, when I was in grad school the University had (for the time) a huge email installation, basically full email hosting for the entire institution. The server and storage spec was excellent -- a big SAN-like dual storage array that could handle failures at multiple levels, including one entire half of the storage system. Turns out they got hit by a nasty filesystem corruption bug, which nuked the whole array. Oops. Their bacon was saved because they also had regular verified tape backups (IIRC, it took many, many weeks to fully restore archived mail to the cluster).

These problems really have little to do with the computing models involved. There's a misperception that the "cloud" provides some sort of data robustness beyond what mere mortals can accomplish, but the reality is that valuable data just needs more copies. Perhaps their backup strategies are layered and awesome, but you never really know where the weak links are. One remote service provider really only ever counts as one copy. And so it's useful to consider a service like GitHub. The fundamental model of the service is to encourage folks to share and copy their data around, because that's a prime goal of the supporting software: git. If a git-based service goes down, there should be many copies of the repository data, and the various users will regroup, republish, and move on. No single user has to be overly conscious of maintaining lots of backups, because copying is the basic working model.

There's a lesson there for those of us working in software: design for subversive backup, where critical data is backed up/synced/secured as a normal part of day-to-day workflow. Make sure that failure in any one point doesn't induce the others to similarly fail or become corrupt. Think through and verify the recovery schemes. Imagine that it's your data going down the tubes...

Re:For the love of God the company is called "Dang

[garcia]

Didn't that throw up any red flags for ANYONE?

I was a Sidekick user from 4/2004 until 10/2008. There had been only one 'catastrophic' failure in that time that left Sidekick users without data service for an extended period. Danger produced one of the best mobile devices, which in many ways is still better than anything out there even though the OS and devices that utilize it (the various Sidekick models that exist these days) is quite a bit outdated compared to devices like the iPhone.

I miss my Sidekick immensely. I loved true multitasking, a fully capable QWERTY keyboard, and incredible battery life. Unfortunately it didn't sync well with calendaring software, didn't keep up with music playing, and is now partially controlled by Microsoft. There have been immense trade offs with moving to the iPhone but based on my main reason for owning an iPhone (I ride the bus and enjoy the music/video player and screen size) it was the right choice for me.

That said, "cloud computing" is something which usually works (and did, in the case of the Sidekick since 2002). I don't think that this is a proven warning sign that "cloud computing" isn't as reliable as everyone believes, I just think it's proof that companies need to do a much better job of ensuring data integrity than they could have ever imagined before.

Will I stop using Flickr, Google products, and other future "cloud" devices/software because of this? No. I am smart enough, as a computer savvy end-user, to keep my own backups of my data but I do believe people need to become better educated in what can and will happen as we move to the model we have slowly done in the last 10 years.

What IS cloud computing?

[dFaust]

Personally, I always interpreted cloud computing as software that's running on a number of boxes of which the number can fluctuate without being meaningful (obviously there are performance implications depending on the overall load and number of boxes, but one box going down doesn't inherently bring down the system). One nice thing is these boxes can be geographically distributed as well - so when one data center gets nuked, the others are safe. Now, I realize geographic distribution isn't a requirement but even still, the press release says the data loss is due to a "server failure." Not a data center failure, but the apparent failure of a single server.

So is this really even "the cloud"? Does that mean that Geocities was "the cloud" or that every web host out there is "the cloud" because they've got my data running on a single machine? I certainly never interpreted it that way, but I'm no expert on the matter. It seems like if this data was in "the cloud" that it could have all been retrieved off of another machine somewhere. Perhaps for some customers those other machines might not yet be completely synced with very recent updates, but that would affect a small amount of data for a subset of customers.

Re:What IS cloud computing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cloud computing is where your data goes up in smoke.

AC for a reason.

Re:What IS cloud computing?

[rwa2]

We'll, I was hoping to just google cloud vs. grid vs. distributed vs. cluster vs. etc. computing, but there doesn't seem to be much official-sounding distinction out there. Which means if we start our own thread here it might become definitive!

"cloud" computing: fluffy term used by people who really don't know anything other than that they run their applications from a web page and their data appears to be stored on the web because they can access it from more than one web browser.

"hosted" / "server farm" computing: buying server resources from someone who has a real datacenter who tries to take care of your hardware. You access all of your data over the network "cloud". Redundancy & support varies based on pricing & services.

"grid" / "utility" computing: computing infrastructure where you should be able to simply scale up CPU, data, etc. resources for your operation simply by throwing money at turning on more boxes. You don't necessarily need to share it with others, though.

"cluster" computing: a computing system made up of more or less independent, generally homogeneous nodes, where problems can be partitioned out. Generally has some form of redundancy so you don't lose work when a single node dies, but probably won't survive a data center failure.

"distributed" computing: special applications that can be farmed out to the net to break parts of computing or storage across a heterogeneous network of computers distributed over many locations. Ideally it's written to be highly redundant and tolerate faults such as nodes joining / leaving the cluster.

As far as reliability goes, the TIA data center tiers seems to be the only common way of talking about maintaining "business continuity". I've read through it briefly, and can somewhat paraphrase the intent (mildly inaccurately, mostly because the standard itself is kinda loose and not defined in too much detail with regards to servers) as:

Tier 1 "basic" : You have a room for servers with a door to keep random people from tripping over the plugs. Maybe you have a UPS on your server so it can do a graceful shutdown without data loss when the power or AC goes out.

Tier 2 : You have your stuff in racks with a raised floor for air conditioning and some wire racks hanging from the ceiling for cable management.

Tier 3 : You have redundant UPS's and RAIDs, CRACs, network links, and stuff, so you can make repairs when common things break without turning off the system (typically anything with moving parts or high currents, like power supplies, fans, disks, batteries needs to be hot-swappable). Which means you should also have some sort of monitoring and alert system so you know when that stuff actually fails so you can replace it before the redundant components also fail. This is intended to reach 24x7 availability with high uptimes... , maybe 3-5 nines.

Tier 4 : Like Tier 3, but certified for mission-critical / life-critical use, like in hospitals and maybe for airplanes and stuff. It should survive prolonged power outages (so you have a diesel generator with a day or two worth of fuel.)

Unfortunately, it just covers build specs for individual data centers, so it doesn't really cover other business continuity things like maintaining offsite backups so you can somewhat easily rebuild from scratch if a natural disaster takes out one of your data centers or something. But it's kind of different worlds of IT between designing facilities and architecting "cloud" services, which unfortunately don't seem to communicate or collaborate as much as they should to reach the kinds of "distributed grid of redundant load-sharing data centers" configurations we'd expect.

Meta-cloud, anyone?

[Fjodor42]

To my mind, this failure just goes to show that what people call clouds are merely the mainframes of yesterdecades... For the cloud to become "THE" cloud, the providers need to cooperate to replicate data across their different implementations, such that when one provider suffers an unforeseen crash of unforeseen magnitudes, the data is til there in the "real" (in this definition) cloud.

Sure, it would take no small amount of convincing to get the management drones to accept this, but I should think that a cost/benefit analysis that includes catastrophic failure would be somewhat persuasive...

Re:Meta-cloud, anyone?

[FlyingBishop]

If someone tells you that they can cheaply prevent catastrophic failure, expect a catastrophic failure. Nothing can correct something like this, which involved an error propagating to the backups.

Re:A reason why cloud computing might be hated on

[vagabond_gr]

It's called Affero GPL

Not a cloud, so why the fuss?

[mangastudent]

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.

Your data is your responsibility.

[zerofoo]

As a wise auditor once told me:

You can outsource the work, but you can not outsource the responsibility.

If your data is important to you - you must back it up, and you must test your backups.

The end.

-ted

Assumptions

[eagl]

Just because you're paying someone to store your data doesn't mean they care about that data as much as you do... That's one of the two big problems with cloud computing that can't be solved by technology. First, nobody cares about your data as much as you do. Second, nobody will protect your data (ie. control it's distribution and prevent unauthorized changes) to the level you find appropriate.

It's usually a good idea to avoid using broad generalities (like I just did), but it seems like in general it would be a bad idea to let someone else be the sole keeper of anything even remotely important or sensitive. There are exceptions, but those seem to be internal to a company (ie. the company runs it's own cloud and has all employees use it). Or military/government applications where centralized security and backup can keep user errors from becoming a real danger to the organization beyond "help I lost my email!".

It's the backup stupid

[trybywrench]

I think the key here is was it only T-Mobile's data that was lost or was every customer of the "cloud" affected. If it was only T-Mobile's data than the issue is T-Mobile's backup policy, if it was "cloud"-wide than it's an issue with the "cloud" provider. In either case, I don't think you can paint the entire "cloud" concept as unstable. Cloud computing is really just a dynamic datacenter with all the usual weak links and issues present in a traditional metal datacenter.

Not a cloud disaster, not a "data center" disaster

[TheLoneGundam]

Leaving aside the fact that a "data center" could consist of two servers under Mabel's desk, this is not a "data center" disaster, nor is it a cloud catastrophe.

This a contract and contract management failure: the contract with the outsource was probably written without specifying that they must do the backups, AND no one established any sort of audit (formal or informal) test to ensure that there _were_ backups being taken and that the outsourcer was performing according to the contract.

Too often, the MBA doing the contract thinks "there, that's handled" once they've gotten all the signatures on the dotted line. "There, backups are handled now" he thinks, because many business folk (not ALL, I don't think it's fair to generalize that far) see these kinds of things as milestones, rather than ongoing processes to be managed.

The Cloud is Just a Big Mainframe

[tjstork]

When you cut through the "cloud", if you look into the center of things, you see that the so-called modern "cloud" computing environment is a giant computer(s), surrounded by high powered priestly geeks, doling out resources to everyone, completely centralized. The priests have some new tricks to entertain the masses with, but there's nothing fundamentally different between cloud computing and IBM's vision of computing in the 1960s.

Re:The Cloud is Just a Big Mainframe

[Attila Dimedici]

I wish I had mod points because that is the best summation of "cloud" computing I have read yet. Every few years some technological development causes this computing paradigm to be brought up as the "new thing" in computing. Every time this happens there are all these people talking about how it is the "wave of the future" and that all computing will go that way. After a few years, people realize that it has the same limitations that caused it to be rejected except for those limited industries and applications where it is a good idea. Of course, most of those were already using the old way of doing this and only move to this where the new implementation is an improvement over the old way.
There are always companies who massively push this "new" approach because it is a great way to guarantee a steady income stream

Re:The Cloud is Just a Big Mainframe

[natoochtoniket]

There is one difference.

In previous decades, for the most part, the company that operated the computing center considered the data to be valuable, and took great care to prevent data loss. They knew that the hardware could fail, and so they made multiple copies of each data file. They did backups, and they checked and tested the backups. Most even stored some copies off-site to hedge against the possibility of catastrophic loss of the entire data center.

At present time, many young people have never seen data loss. Many people do not realize that hardware failure is even possible. If they make backups, they rarely check or test the fidelity or reliability of those backups. Those same people are administering the data center operations. Managing the disk farm, replacing failed mirrors, and making backups of customers data, are all activities that are part of the service. As far as many of the MBA types are concerned, all of those are just costs to be minimized.

A single disk might have a MTBF of 30 years. But a system that uses ten thousand disks will have a MTBF of about a day. (On average, a disk will fail somewhere in the system, every day.) RAID systems do not eliminate the issue, because simultaneous disk failure is possible. And a power-supply failure, fire, explosion, software failure, or employee can kill a whole bunch of disks all at once.

In my own organization, I want to know where my data is. I want mirrored disks to minimize the operational effects of common hardware failure, and off-line/off-site backups so we can stay in business after an uncommon failure. I want to review the backup schedule. I want regular verification of backup status. I want periodic audits of the backups, to be sure they really exist and that they can really be read. And, when the data is vital to the continuance of my business, that verification and auditing must not be outsourced.

Whenever your MBAs want to cut the cost of doing backups, you really should check with the underwriter of your business-continuation insurance.

No true scotsman

[vadim_t]

This is awfully convenient. Something that at least to my eyes looks a lot like a cloud crashes. Cloud pundits announce:

"if it loses your data - it's not a cloud".

So if Amazon's S3 ever fails horribly and loses everybody's data, then it wasn't a cloud either.

Is the distinction meaningful?

[FauxReal]

But some cloud technologists insist data center failures are not cloud failures. Is this distinction meaningful?

Do you think the customer will want to argue semantics with you after you've lose their data?

Re:A reason why cloud computing might be hated on

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think that has anything to do with it; at least not for me. My main concern with cloud computing is trust. Do I trust someone other than myself to not fuck up and lose all my data? For critical data, the answer is no. If somebody is going to fuck up and lose all my data, it's going to be me. I don't know if all the data on a Sidekick would qualify as critical, but it would certainly be annoying as fuck to lose it all.

An epic fail, and missed lessons (so far)

[rickb928]

I'm a TMO subscriber, and I love them, so this is painful. And my sister-in-law is a longtime Sidekick user, so she's in a special agony.

But T-Mobile is in a potentially no-win situation. They obviously have to believe Danger/Microsoft that they have good processes to avoid and recover from such failures. They didn't, and now TMO is probably going to take the hit. On one hand, they should - if the service is important, take responsibility and ensure management. On the other hand, they have good assurances, so hey, how much is enough?

BlackBerry users, you should take note. Rim differs only in scale. Ahd, you hope, depth of resilience. Not that RIM hasn't had outages, though not total failure yet.

TMO may have to tell their Sidekick users to be prepared for the inevitable restore, and of course, work with Danger/Microsoft to re-establish service (even though they don't provide service, D/M does), and of course some money compensation no matter how inadequate.

And maybe offer them shiny new myTouch3Gs to give the disillusioned Sidekick users an option with a marginally better track record.

No, wait, that isn't right. I've had to wipe my G1 every update, and some apps don't have a way to save data. They just don't.

I'm glad I never got on the Sidekick train, but I have no hope that this won't some day hit me. Do you suppose the next major Sidekick update will include data backup? :)

Re:An epic fail, and missed lessons (so far)

[Chuckstar]

Blackberry data flows through RIM servers, but does not reside there.

Cloud failure? Microsoft failure.

[RR]

This is a service run by Microsoft. Microsoft is a bit hostile to consumers. It would be ironic and sad if Microsoft's failure to maintain the Sidekick service gets blamed on the faceless "Cloud" and it hurts Microsoft's competitors.

predictably doomed

[jipn4]

Danger held your data hostage from the start and didn't provide backup. Then, when Microsoft took them over, it was clear that they were going to mess with the service and servers. No backup + Microsoft mucking with the servers = kiss your data goodbye.

But that's no more an indictment of hosted services or "cloud computing" than a Windows BSOD is an indictment of desktop computing. Microsoft screwed up, and quite predictably, too.

"if it loses your data - it's not a cloud".

[John Hasler]

Just define away your problems. ROFL.

If You Want Something Done Right!

[Prototerm]

Why on Earth would you trust your valuable data (and if it wasn't valuable to you, why keep it in the first place?) to someone else, someone who doesn't answer to the same people you do? I have always thought that "the cloud" is an epic fail waiting to happen. As a concept, it makes no sense. It's a scheme worthy of Professor Harold Hill himself.

You want your data safe? You want it backed up properly? Don't want to lose it? Then put it on your own hardware and take care of it yourself. Don't leave it to someone else to save your bacon when something goes wrong. Because, in the end, they don't care about you. You're just a monthly fee to them, and the agreement/contract/whatever you signed with them absolves them of all responsibility.

Re:Cloud Failure

[commodore64_love]

No it's cold. Besides how am I going to watch these latest episodes of Stargate and Eureka if I'm outside playing with the squirrels and birds?

Sort of

[Kirby]

Well, any time you're storing data in a central place, you have a greater consequence of failure. That's a downside of "cloud computing", or any web application that stores data in a database too.

The alternative approach is everyone to have a local version of their data, which will be lost by individuals all the time but not by everyone all at once.

Obviously, if you have a server that's a single point of failure for your company, and you botch a maintenance, something went very wrong. And not having a backup - it seems strange for a company that's been around the block a few times and has big resources behind it. You have to write this off as more of a specific failure and not a failure of the concept of storing data on a remote server.

I do have a good friend that works for Danger - I really don't envy the week he must be having.

Re:For the love of God the company is called "Dang

[sopssa]

Tip: If you want to link to specific part in youtube video, you can add #t=1m3s etc on it, ie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcFUDvTFokg#t=1m40s

Also adding &hd=1 gives hq/hd version.

Re:Cloud Failure

[slim]

I know my songs, videos, and other important files are backed-up across triple drives. I don't know if the same is true if I stored them online, and this major failure of Sidekick demonstrates I'm right not to trust them.

That depends entirely on the online storage service you use. If your contract says the files are backed up across triple drives, then you've a right to expect that they are. If your contract doesn't say that, then you shouldn't expect it. Simple.

Now, I'd argue that any cloud service worthy of the name ought to have very robust mirrored storage. But since there's no legal definition of the word, you'd better read the contract.

Cloud Computing

[snspdaarf]

The best part of TFA is the comment below from their version of an A/C:

Cloud architecture shards data

In this case it certainly did.

TOS

[ei4anb]

The TOS probably made the users aware that "your data is in Danger" so they can't complain now :-)

if you don't control your destiny, you will fail.

[swschrad]

not just stuffy history book stuff or national security, IMPHO it fully applies to "the cloud."

if Microsoft can't even build a robust cloud environment, that experiment is done.

"danger," indeed.

Lightning bolt: Microsoft's gutting of Danger

[Locutus]

Microsoft gutted Danger and left it on life support but all the while they lead their customers( T-Mobile and users ) to believe Danger was thriving and doing fine. Wow, doesn't that sound like Paulson in early 2007 having stated that the banking system was just fine? The difference, Paulson really was clueless while Microsoft knew darn well they'd pulled most of Dangers developers over to their project Pink.

This is what should be up in lights with flares and fireworks and not anything about how bad/good cloud computing is. But once again, there is Microsoft at the wheel and yet the press is saying "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain".

And this interesting in tying this to cloud computing sounds eerily familiar since I just read how Steve Ballmer was bashing IBM for not running their business correctly. Basically, paying too much attention to software and cloud computing and he's all amped about this right when yet another Microsoft failure proves how bad they are at this. Could be spin control so watch for more of the same if it is.

LoB

Re:A reason why cloud computing might be hated on

[Jezza]

Mod the parent up!

There are two sides to this (at least). If you're moving your data "to the cloud" you'd expect that "the cloud" is one hell of a lot more reliable than you are. Let's face it, they should be - the economics of scale mean it's a lot cheaper for them to host your data and lots of other's data, than it is for you alone.

But that isn't what's happened in this case, here Microsoft (!) haven't even covered the basics. This is stunning.

So does this call into question "cloud computing" or just Microsoft's "cloud computing"? This is a difficult question to answer, without being able to see for yourself your cloud partner's infrastructure and procedures you can't really be sure... But would anyone make such a foolish mistake? Microsoft have proven that the answer is "yes, if it's Microsoft", the real question is should that be just: "yes"?

I think most of us now want a more hybrid approach, "in the cloud" is nice, but I also want a "local copy".

Then you have to think about the other kind of "lose" where others gain access to data they shouldn't see...

Re:A reason why cloud computing might be hated on

[Just Some Guy]

This is an unforeseen hole in the bulletproof Gandhi mechanism, so I foresee a quick "GPL V3.1" to close this. And then all is well.

How is it a hole when people who don't redistribute code aren't required to redistribute the source that created it? If you maintain a local branch of my code and use it to process your data, more power to you. It'd be nice if you did give back your changes, but that wasn't the offer I made to you and I don't have any right to expect it of you. End-user licenses like the AGPL are dangerous hacks that'll get more bad press than they'll make up for with the minor community good they do.

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:I'm officially lost.

[James McP]

"Real" cloud computing is supposed to be based on a mesh of geographically diverse, redundant servers each carrying various subsets of the data. Think RAID5 for servers, with each partition located in a different part of the world and on different networks.

Which means it is nothing more than an internet based service with five 9s of reliability and availability.

However it is an *expensive* internet based service so it needs a new moniker. But without a "Cloud Computing Consortium" with ownership of the trademark "cloud computing" to enforce correct usage, there's nothing to prevent everyone and their dog from using the term incorrectly for any "always connected" application.

The problem with all this is that its almost impossible for an end user to know for sure if someone really has a proper cloud application until something fails. If there is a total failure of a site and no one notices, you've got a working cloud. If people lose data or functionality, you don't.