Links List 10.16.09

October 16th, 2009 by Valerie Barber

Just days after it claimed its cloud operated at 99.999% availability (better than Google Apps), DISA has backed down and now claims 99.99% availability. What’s the big deal? “Five nines” equates to 5.26 minutes of downtime in a given year – “four nines” allows 52.6 minutes. “I think I stuttered midway through the sentence when we were talking about availability,” admits Henry Sienkiewicz, Technical Program Director of DISA’s Computing Services and RACE Team.

Seems to be the season for outages – or maybe it’s just human nature to want to look at and talk about everyone else’s problems. Whatever the case, it’s interesting to look beyond the hype of outages and disruptions for a quick reality check.

• IBM’s six-hour data center outage and backup system failure crippled Air New Zealand’s passenger check-in, online booking systems and call center and stranded more than 10,000 passengers. Airline officials lashed out at IBM in an email for not taking responsibility of the outage and downtime that cost them millions of dollars in lost revenue as well as customer inconveniences at the end of a holiday:

“In my 30-year working career, I am struggling to recall a time where I have seen a supplier so slow to react to a catastrophic system failure such as this and so unwilling to accept responsibility and apologise to its client and its client’s customers.”

Rob Fyfe, Air Newzealand CEO

IBM released a statement and the closest they came to making an apology was:

“However, the likely cause appears to have been a failed oil pressure sensor on a backup generator. We regret any inconvenience caused to our clients or their customers.”

• When it comes to branding, maybe naming your an online back-up/restore service “Danger” is not such a good idea. Danger suffered a server failure and they seem to lack a backup system of its own. As a result, an undetermined number of Sidekick users (maybe 1 million) have permanently lost contacts, calendar entries, photos and other personal info. Help desk 101: back up your data before you upgrade.
• Take a brief look at other recent high profile cloud computing outages as well as an interesting post that argues “if the cloud were really the cloud then outages would be rare“.

A couple of weeks ago Larry Ellison was fined by the Transaction Processing Council (TPC) for false advertising regarding performance benchmarks that had not been released. It seems all is now well, since the TPC has issued its report. Ellison says he is always wary of benchmarks, so he issued a $10 million challenge: if your Oracle database application doesn’t run at least twice as fast on Sun hardware as on IBM’s fastest computer, he’ll pay $10 million. Even IBM is welcome to enter! Also at the event, Sun chairman Scott McNealy reassured Sun customers that they have nothing to fear from Oracle. (Sounds like the doctor telling you “this isn’t going to hurt one bit.”)

You know you’re getting old(er) when you can remember all of the milestones leading up to this week’s 15th anniversary of Netscape Navigator, the first commercial web browser. By allowing anyone to view text and images posted on Web sites, Navigator helped launch the Internet era.

Fish on Friday! Last week the police and FBI charged 100 people as part of Operation Phish Phry, one of the largest cyber fraud phishing cases to date. FBI director Robert Mueller described the events as a “cyber arms race” between criminals and law enforcement. Funny that Mueller himself almost fell for an online banking phishing attack. His wife has since banned him from banking online.

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