Western Digital 'MyCloud' Is Down 5 Days and Counting

Nemo the Magnificent (2786867) writes "A friend of mine bought a Western Digital 'MyCloud' NAS server (non-RAID) a couple of weeks ago. WD implements the cloud service through its wd2go.com site. He reports that that site is down and has been since last Wednesday. No word on when it'll be back up. The only official announcements are daily repeats of this canned posting: 'Our My Cloud and My Book Live users are experiencing intermittent issues with WD servers that enable remote access when using these products. These issues include poor transfer speeds and/or inability to connect remotely. We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience and we are working very hard to resolve these issues and resume normal service as soon as possible. We thank you for your patience and will provide updates as they are available.'"

Comments

When should you abandon a service for error?

[SuperKendall]

I had something similar happen recently, my bank website authentication going out for four days (it was part of an upgrade that went bad).

That's pretty much unthinkable these days. It really made me think, if that's even possible it may be a good idea to abandon this bank for some other.

Would other people give a service a one time pass for a multi-day outage if they otherwise liked the service? Or should that be a flag to drop them, any time it occurs? If the criteria you use to leave a service is too strict, you may be switching often...

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[nyctopterus]

I would stay with them if they were relatively transparent about what went wrong, and what they are doing to prevent such occurrences in the future. Especially if we're dealing with relatively new sorts of tech services.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[Todd Knarr]

That's pretty much unthinkable these days.

No, it's pretty much routine these days, just like it has been for the last... well, 34 years that I've been dealing with computers personally. Management doesn't see any reason to spend the (to be honest, fairly large chunks of) money to do a truly bullet-proof deployment that can tolerate things going pear-shaped without loss or interruption of service, because the salesman who sold them the tech swore on his mother's grave that it was bullet-proof and you didn't need to worry (his mother's still alive and running a three-card Monte scam in the Bronx, BTW). Murphy, being Murphy, puts his two cents in, and deployments go pear-shaped. And the users get to suffer for it.

Of course, I wouldn't buy WD's service anyway. Residential Internet's not suited for heavy upload, which is what you'll be doing fetching files from your drive at home, and that's on top of having to depend on a cloud service run by a company that's not a heavy-duty cloud service provider. Instead I'd buy a NAS box for the local network that doesn't depend on someone else's servers, and use Dropbox or Google Drive or the like for cloud storage. I'd also consider the cloud storage ephemeral and never ever put 100% trust in it, if I really have to have the data available then it goes on CD/DVD or thumb drive or a laptop's hard drive. Trust not in someone else's servers, for you can do nothing about any problems on their end and you are not a large enough chunk of their business that you can force them to jump when you say "Frog.".

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[RabidReindeer]

I would stay with them if they were relatively transparent about what went wrong, and what they are doing to prevent such occurrences in the future. Especially if we're dealing with relatively new sorts of tech services.

I would concern myself with the details of the outage. If critical banking services were down, they may be "saving" too much money on IT.

Banking and computers go almost all the way back to the beginning. Probably only the military, scientific and insurance industries can claim as much. As a result, there are a multitude of banking software packages and service vendors with long histories to choose from.

But just as there are banks that aren't competent with their investments, there are banks which are incompetent with their IT.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[FireFury03]

I had something similar happen recently, my bank website authentication going out for four days (it was part of an upgrade that went bad).

That's pretty much unthinkable these days. It really made me think, if that's even possible it may be a good idea to abandon this bank for some other.

Would other people give a service a one time pass for a multi-day outage if they otherwise liked the service? Or should that be a flag to drop them, any time it occurs? If the criteria you use to leave a service is too strict, you may be switching often...

Things break unexpectedly - whilst it shouldn't happen, it does and so long as it doesn't happen frequently and the vendor is reasonably proactive I'd generally give them a pass (for one thing, moving a bank account or similar is probably more hassle than a one-off outage). If it keeps happening then yes, I'd move to a vendor that has historically shown to be able to run a more reliable service.

However, one thing that I think is unforgivable is when the vendor doesn't bother to actually keep their customers informed. A single "the service is down, sorry" post which doesn't give any ETA, progress updates or anything just isn't good enough. Tell the customer what's going on! It seems to be all too common to keep the customer as uninformed as possible these days, especially with the larger companies. I imagine it's a combination of PR damage mitigation and liability concerns, but its just not helpful to the customers - I'm much happier to give my business to a company who says "oops, sorry, we screwed up, here's what went wrong, but we've now investigated and put measures in place to make sure it doesn't happen again" than a company who has an unexplained outage and doesn't provide any information about it.

I'll give an example - back in the 90s I had my internet connection from a small ISP called Demon Internet. They were pretty good - the techies knew what they were doing and they gave regular status updates. If something went wrong, they would publish it. If an outage was caused by someone screwing up then they'd let everyone know, even if it's a stupid "oops we unplugged the wrong cable". Then they got bought by Thus, a much bigger company, and the "big company" mentality very quickly showed - the techies stopped talking to the customers, status updates rarely happened and they especially never admitted that they'd made a mistake. I wasted hours on several occasions debugging my CPE because they swore blind they had no network problems so it must be my end before it became very apparent that they did know about problems in their network and they were just trying to keep it quiet. And that is why I dropped them - I'm not interested in dealing with businesses that waste my time by covering up their problems and refusing to keep their customers informed.

WRT services like MyCloud, I do wonder what kind of terms & conditions they give the end user, given that this is essentially a paid-for service. If they provide absolutely no service guarantees and can shut it all down on a whim then clearly it isn't worth paying for.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[AmiMoJo]

I would concern myself with the details of the outage. If critical banking services were down, they may be "saving" too much money on IT.

On the other hand maybe they discovered a serious security issue and did the responsible thing while properly fixing it. A lot of banks just seem to ignore security issues.

Re:When should you abandon a service for error?

[AmiMoJo]

The thing is they should have redundancy built into the system. They must have vast storage networks and then a load of front-end infrastructure to handle access to it. That means hundreds, probably thousands of individual servers. Their system should not be vulnerable to the failure of a few of them.

In fact I'd guess that they don't even run the storage themselves, they probably farm it out to someone like Amazon and then just manage the front end stuff.

This smacks of incompetence. They aren't even bothering to blame anyone else like their connectivity provider. They must have screwed up massively somehow and are now struggling to fix the situation. I just hope they have not lost any data...

Re:HDD != Cloud

[Frobnicator]

Choose your vendor carefully. HDD manufacturers are probably not good at cloud services.

You obviously don't know what the MyCloud service is.

Basically it does the same job of Dynamic DNS and NAT traversal, but just for your network drive. You attach your drive to your home network --- up to 4TB in size --- provide a username and password, and you're done. You log in to their wd2go site and have full access to your 4TB drive. It saves the hassle of trying to fight constantly rolling IP addresses, trying to open ports and map them to devices, and do all the other technical stuff.

Hence the name. "My Cloud". Not "Google's Cloud", or "Amazon's Cloud" or "Drop Box's Cloud", it is a cheap and easy way to get your mass storage online.

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[Frobnicator]

Cut out the middleman and no downtime from corporate ineptitude.

Great. Explain to your technically illiterate parents, friends and neighbors how to implement DynDNS, how to poke holes in their firewall, and how to implement a web-based TLS-using file server.

The point of these devices is that a lay person can plug it in to their home network, put in a username and password, then access their 4TB drive anywhere on the world.

I've got one, I've got a 2TB collection of data that I regularly syphon files from when I am traveling. It is easy and works great, I don't need to leave a PC running (draining my wallet through the power company) to access all the data since it is a low-power device. It is as fast as my internet speed and costs nothing for the service.

Re:HDD != Cloud

[Big Hairy Ian]

it is a cheap and easy way to get your mass storage online.

Or off-line as it is at the moment

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[wonkey_monkey]

Port forwarding is similarly handled via a pointy-clicky interface.

Pointy-clicky-typey last time I checked. And it requires knowing your IP address - most tech illiterates probably couldn't even tell you their machine's name, let alone
it's IP address (which would be usually set by DHCP and therefore liable - thought not likely - to change).

It's definitely something that you can explain to a technically illiterate person who to do (although explaining what they're doing and why is a bit more tricky).

And implementing the web-based TLS-using file server? I'd certainly never recommend putting your own out there on the internet over using a third party's service and letting them deal with the security hassles (assuming they can do so without a week's downtime, of course).

Re:I'll be avoiding WD products. Thanks.

[SpzToid]

Except statistics have shown, especially with WD acquiring Hitachi, WD makes the best hard drives. Your only other option is Seagate, and those same recently published stats show you better now.

Now you may have a point about their consumer cloud DNS traversal services (i.e. keeping their own cloud up), but they kinda own the HD market right now.

Re:I'll be avoiding WD products. Thanks.

[SpzToid]

to better clarify what I wrote and am replying to, stats say you better not buy Seagate drives.

http://arstechnica.com/informa...

Re:HDD != Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you don't know how marketing works.

It's In The Cloud. Therefore, since it is In The Cloud, it is at once, Secure, Reliable and Available.

This is how marketing terms work. And WD's MyCloud is exactly that--marketing. Stop making apologies for them.

Re:I'll be avoiding WD products. Thanks.

[gl4ss]

yes, if you want to use their gateway proxy servers to access your paid for harddisk then yeah it depends on them.. but on the other hand, part of the money paid for the drive also goes towards keeping those running.

i think if these are like mybooks you can access them from the lan just fine..

Re:DynDNS and a real NAS

[Richard_at_work]

As if DynDNS has never had any downtime...

And you obviously don' t know about portable HDs

[Viol8]

Or USB sticks. Guess what - they fit in your pocket and you don't need internet access or some shoddy "cloud" service to access your data which you have to leave connected 24/7. Oh , but it password protected so it must be safe.

Re:HDD != Cloud

[N1AK]

Stop making apologies for them.

He was explaining what the service was to someone who clearly didn't know, the difference between that and apologising is pretty vast so I'm surprised you couldn't spot the difference. Believe it or not, one doesn't need to defend a service provider in order to wish to help inform people of what the service is.

Re:Are they getting DoSed?

[Gothmolly]

Begun, the Cloud War has?

Re:I'll be avoiding WD products. Thanks.

[tfranzese]

Probably because there was no Hitachi Deathstar experience. He might recall the IBM Deskstar failures (75GXP), but that occurred years before they sold their hard drive division to Hitachi.