Re: [outages] News item: Blackberry services down worldwide, Egypt affected (not N.A.)

[Chris Campbell <chris () ctcampbell com>]

I think it raises serious questions about RIM's DR strategy if a DB corruption or switch failure or whatever can cause 
this much outage. 'Surely' RIM have an second site that is independent of the primary (within reason) that they could 
of flipped to when they realised the DB was borked. If not then any business that relies on them needs to be shouting 
from the rooftops to get RIM to fix it.

Chris.


On 12 Oct 2011, at 16:49, Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu wrote:

> On Wed, 12 Oct 2011 09:52:02 CDT, -Hammer- said:
> > What kills me is what they have told the public. The lost a "core 
> > switch". I don't know if they actually mean network switch or not but 
> > I'm pretty sure any of us that work on an enterprise environment know 
> > how to factor N+1 just for these types of days. And then the backup 
> > solution failed? I'm not buying it either.
>
> Yeah, and that extra comma in the one config file that didn't make a difference
> when you tested the failover in the lab *never* makes a difference when it hits
> in the production network, right?  Or they changed the config of the primary and
> it didn't get propogated just right to the backup, or they had mismatched firmware
> levels on blades in the blades on the primary and backup switches, so traffic that
> didn't tickle a bug on the primary blades caused the blade to crash on the backup,
> or...
>
> Anybody on this list who's been around long enough probably has enough "We
> should have had N+2 because the N+1'th device failed too" stories to drain
> *several* pitchers of beer at a good pub... I've even had one case where my
> butt got *saved* from a ohnosecond-class whoops because the N+1'th device *was*
> crashed (stomped a config file, it replicated, was able to salvage a copy from
> a device that didn't replicate because it was down at the time).