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Strongspace's 10-Day Crash Highlights Web Storage Risks
1/21/2008
For the last 10 days, Sausalito, CA-based online document and storage hosting company Joyent struggled to get its online secure document collaboration service, Strongspace, back online.
During the outage, the company's clients had no access to their hosted documents--leaving some IT pros to wonder whether the features of such online collaboration services are worth the risks.
A Bad Week Gets Worse
It all started Saturday, Jan. 12, when the company's two online repositories--BingoDisk, for data storage, and Strongspace--went down owing to issues encountered by its Sunfire X4500 server.
Joyent CEO David Young started a Jan. 16 post announcing the crash by joking that it "was not the week to stop drinking."
"We got bit by a massive ZFS bug. That's the long and the short of it," he wrote in a follow-up post. "The good news is we can unravel the corruption. The bad news, given the fact that Strongspace and BingoDisk ran on a Thumper (aka SunFire X4500) (48 500GiB drives), was that we have to use other Thumpers to stage the uncoding of the ZFS mess. Moving so much data around to decode the ZFS corruption has taken time."
And it did. While BingoDisk went back online Friday, problems with Storagespace continued. On Sunday, the company sent an e-mail to customers stating that the service was back up, only to send another e-mail today that it was back down. Several "up" and "down" notifications on the company's Web site and blogs followed, with estimates for the service being restored "late Monday afternoon."
The service was down around 3 p.m PST Monday afternoon, then appeared to be back up a short time later. A post made late Monday said that the servers were back up and being watched "closely."
"I'll put it back into production for a period of 24 hours and we'll watch it closely," a company tech stated in the latest post. "The hope will be that ... Tuesday night we can do a clean shutdown and be beyond this silliness. Fingers crossed."
Joyent did not respond to our request for verification of the service's current status and comment on the situation by press time.
Too Late?
While Joyent has repeatedly assured customers that no data has been lost --
it praised ZFS highly for its work in helping fix the problem--the amount
of time the service was out combined with the up-and-down nature of the restoration
appears to have shaken some customers.
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