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Strongspace's 10-Day Crash Highlights Web Storage Risks
1/21/2008
"While I appreciate the hard work you guys are doing to get everything back online, I'm starting to find it unacceptable that we've unable to use the service for over a week," wrote one user on the company's blog. "We rely on the service for client data transfers that are critical to our business. When our non-technical clients ask why there seems to be no redundancy built into a service that is likely used by many for business critical purposes, I find myself with no explanation."
"What a mess. Please, just fix it or simply admit that you cannot. This has been going on for ONE WEEK," wrote another.
Another blog poster wrote that while he's relatively happy with how Joyent has communicated about the problems, "the false starts are unfortunate...in a situation like this, given everything that's happened, I would expect them to fully test things (and double check them) before claiming that things are back to normal."
An IT executive and Joyent customer we talked with who asked not to be named said that the whole experience is "just unacceptable," leaving him to question the future of his company using online document hosting -- whether from Joyent or others.
"How could they allow this to happen?" he questioned. "This is really bad--you can't even access your account, let alone the documents."
While his company is not hosting any current projects on the service, it did a few months ago, and he said if this outage had happened then, "We'd be dead in the water."
"Obviously, it changes my intial view that this was a very secure, high-availability solution for remote storage," he stated, adding that the situation is a game-changer for any IT professional looking at this or similar solutions: "[IT professionals are] going to have to...to treat [hosted services] much like you would internal storage, and have a backup and recovery plan, because it's clear these types of vendors face internally the same IT issues [as] internal IT departments."
Young posted Joyent and customers will receive "generous" compensation for the outages; details have yet to be released.
In the meantime, customers located near Joyent's office may want to cruise by: The company has a standing offer to give any customer who drops in a Joyent T-shirt plus "a fine whiskey, a glass of Pernod, or for you lightweights ... a good old bottle of water."
Considering what's happened during the last week, it shouldn't be too hard to convince Joyent to give you a double--or to find someone to join you.
Becky Nagel is executive editor, Web Initiatives for the 1105 Redmond Media Group and the editor of Redmondmag.com.
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