Wednesday 10 August 2011

OWN ExchangeDefender Outage – Begs The Question: Where Is the Redundancy?

Currently, OWN’s services are all down. _All_ down.

We are able to get status updates from OWN’s NOC Twitter account here:

image

Note that the last tweet indicated above points to a power plant being offline thus hitting the Data Centre (DC). Given the heat wave going on in some parts of the USA having a power plant go offline is not an unexpected event anymore.

Even our own power systems here in the province of Alberta are running close to their limits.

With ExchangeDefender’s user base growing at such a high rate over the last number of years, having a single point of failure for the services here in North America becomes a drawback.

Not to be harsh, but this outage truly begs the questions:

  • Where is ExchangeDefender’s service redundancy?
  • And, if there is indeed a redundant DC located elsewhere what happened to the failover sequences?

As more and more folks sign up for the ExchangeDefender service, this has to be a question asked at the highest levels. Given Vlad Mazek’s business acumen and past responsiveness to service issues we sure hope that this incident will bring about a solution that will virtually eliminate the possibility of the whole service going offline again.

Perhaps this will be a “growing pain” experience.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

4 comments:

Fr. Arthur Joseph said...

Well stated, good points about the need for a more robust system.

Anonymous said...

My customers are effected as well, but it seems to be more related to a auto cutover switch for _when_ there is a power outage. Seems that failed to kick in now that there is an actual outage. The genrator is on, but no juice is flowing.

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Yeah, we now know that it was not the power coming into the DC but the Automatic Transfer Switch that blew up killing both inbound power and power from the generator.

Ouch!

Philip

Anonymous said...

Nice to know that there is still a single point of failure with the Automatic Transfer Switch. This is the third outage in a month with this one being the worst. This time all of my customers are being moved to a different provider. At least they won't have to worry about my customers being part of their growth problem.