Forecast for SaaS: cloudy with scattered failures ...

["Rob, grandpa of Ryan, Trevor, Devon & Hannah" <rMslade () shaw ca>]

One of the drawbacks of cloud computing was dramatically illustrated on June 30 
as Rackspace, one of the world’s largest Web hosts, went offline for 45 minutes. 
New Zealand’s Xero was one of many SaaS (software-as-a-service) providers 
knocked out by the failure, with glitches continuing for hours. The accounting 
software provider went offline around 8:30 a.m. as Rackspace, which hosts all of 
Xero’s data, was hit by a still-unexplained, catastrophic failure. All Xero servers 
were back up and running by 9:10 a.m., the chief operations officer told NBR.  But 
some customers were still reporting problems logging on through the morning and 
early afternoon, as recorded on Xero’s blog.  The fault was caused by a power 
failure at the U.S. company’s giant data center in Dallas. But with Rackspace 
maintaining server farms around nine locations in the United States, United 
Kingdom, and Hong Kong, it is not clear why a failure at one facility took its 
systems completely offline. The power fault also took out Rackspace’s own Web 
site and help center, adding to the confusion. It was left to the company’s Twitter 
account to relay the disaster to the outside world. When Rackspace came back 
online, it was running on a mix of utility and backup power.

Rackspace hosts sites and services for more than 62,000 companies.   

http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/xero-taken-offline-massive-us-data-centre-failure-
104349  

======================  (quote inserted randomly by Pegasus Mailer)
rslade () vcn bc ca     slade () victoria tc ca     rslade () computercrime org
`Notwithstanding'--that is the metaphor for Canada - A Fotheringham
http://victoria.tc.ca/techrev/rms.htm 
http://blog.isc2.org/isc2_blog/slade/index.html http://twitter.com/rslade
http://blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/author/p1/

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