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There''s No Outage Here

  • February 26, 2006 at 9:27 am

    #365349

    When does an outage occur? It's a question that I have dealt with at a few jobs and Salesforce.com has been working through the past few months. There were reports of an outage this winter. Customers reported outages, including several hours on Jan 30, 2006 along with a few other dates. Customers reported features unavailable for various slices of times.

    Salesforce.com's Bruce Francis, a VP there, denies this. "We were not down for several hours. That's just not true," Francis said. "Some of our customers experienced intermittent access this morning for about a half an hour."

    It's an interesting question. Maybe something an article needs to be written about since it's a complicated question. If you cannot get to the SQLServerCentral.com servers, are we down? If the articles can be read and posts made in the forums, but search doesn't work, are we down? What if you just were trying to hit the search page from a bookmark?

    I can understand Salesforce.com trying to spin their problems, especially with a new data center in the works, but I wonder how they prove this to their customers? Or how their customers can find out if their service was really down and get credit?

    Uptime has become a much more difficult thing to measure with distributed systems. It pays to understand the ins and outs of how your outlook may differ from your CIO's.

    Steve Jones

  • March 2, 2006 at 6:16 am

    #624269

    A key issue at the planning stage whether the service is mission critical or not.  Otherwise there must be a discussion what is an acceptable amount of down time not 'if'.

    The trade off is that you have or at least should have created efficiencies with the web services that your competitors do not have and if they speed business quicker 95% of the time over those who have not invested in such then it is a no brainer.

    In contrast, if your business is only functions because of the web service, serious problems can arise.  There is a study from GE (their back generator arm, around 2000, a vested interest report of course but reasonable I think) that showed that after a week of down time you might as well shut the business down.

    Most companies viable ones anyway, probably use a mix of internal and externalisable web apps, harvesting the benefits of both.

     

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