Slashdot Mirror
When the Power Goes Out At Google
1sockchuck writes "What happens when the power goes out in one of Google's mighty data centers? The company has issued an incident report on a Feb. 24 outage for Google App Engine, which went offline when an entire data center lost power. The post-mortem outlines what went wrong and why, lessons learned and steps taken, which include additional training and documentation for staff and new datastore configurations for App Engine. Google is earning strong reviews for its openness, which is being hailed as an excellent model for industry outage reports. At the other end of the spectrum is Australian host Datacom, where executives are denying that a Melbourne data center experienced water damage during weekend flooding, forcing tech media to document the outage via photos, user stories and emails from the NOC."
We might need to contact Enron to instigate more rolling black-outs (like they did in the late 90's). This might help keep the population under control.
This just goes to show that Google is as "incompetent" as anyone else. There was a discussion on here the other day and a poster asked why Microsoft, with all of their resources, hasn't come up with a secure OS yet. It was suggested that the know how to create such an OS is out there, and it would just take money and will on Microsoft's part. This seems like the Google equivalent.
Google is trying to push Apps as a replacement for Exchange and Office. They are trying to push it as a replacement for hosting in house. I steered my organization away from Apps for the time being because I wasn't impressed with their support and there are a whole slew of other people who feel like they are being jerked around by Google for what should be simple support issues. It is not reassuring that Google hasn't gotten high availability down yet for one of their flagship products. I'm glad that they are being transparent about where they screwed up, but come on now, really? They haven't figured out fail-over yet? This is Google, the multi-hundred billion dollar organization. They can't fail-over one of their core offerings?