Where where you when The Challenger Exploded in 1986? Where were you when Hurricane Katrinia made landfall in 2005? Where were you when Twitter went down in 2012?
Okay you got me, Twitter going down is not in the same category as the other events but you could have fooled me with the amount of buzz going around yesterday during their outage! If you were climbing Mount Everest yesterday then you might not know that Twitter had its biggest outage in the last 8 months. Ohh wait, I forgot that people have been tweeting from the top of Everest since this time last year!
Mazen Rawashdeh told us yesterday in Twitter’s blog that
“At approximately 9:00am PDT, we discovered that Twitter was inaccessible for all web users, and mobile clients were not showing new Tweets. We immediately began to investigate the issue and found that there was a cascading bug in one of our infrastructure components. This wasn’t due to a hack or our new office or Euro 2012 or GIF avatars, as some have speculated today. A “cascading bug” is a bug with an effect that isn’t confined to a particular software element, but rather its effect “cascades” into other elements as well. One of the characteristics of such a bug is that it can have a significant impact on all users, worldwide, which was the case today. As soon as we discovered it, we took corrective actions, which included rolling back to a previous stable version of Twitter.
We began recovery at around 10:10am PDT, dropped again around 10:40am PDT, and then began full recovery at 11:08am PDT. We are currently conducting a comprehensive review to ensure that we can avoid this chain of events in the future.”
One of my Segue co-workers made a comment yesterday that it’s nice to know that even huge companies like Twitter sometimes have problems. This is the truth about technology, there is always something that can go wrong. During the design of any technology solution you should also be thinking about the various things that can effect your service.
Can you host your own application, website, email service? For most companies the answer is yes. It is not very difficult to throw a server together that will accomplish these tasks. The question that you need to ask is SHOULD you host your own application, website, email service. What happens if your Internet connection goes down? What about your building losing power? Have you ever had hardware failure? You probably have some disaster recovery practices in place like a UPS (Battery Backup), spare hardware, external backup solutions, etc. While these are great starts, they will NOT ensure you have an uptime of 99.99%. Anything less than that is not really acceptable nowadays. Most companies just don’t have the financial or technical ability to completely eliminate these possibilities.
This is where Segue can step in and help you out. Our partnership with Rackspace Hosting allows us to provide you with the service you need at a fraction of the cost that it would take to do it yourself.
Power Issues
If there is ever a power outage, all of the Rackspace data centers receive conditioned UPS power. The UPS power subsystems used are N+1 redundant, with instantaneous fail over if the primary UPS fails. If power is out for an extended amount of time, on-site diesel generators will kick in and run indefinitely.
The data centers also have N+1 redundant HVAC (Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning) systems which ensures that a duplicate HVAC will immediately come online should there be a failure.
Internet Outages
To prevent Internet outages to your systems the Rackspace data centers have nine different service providers connected via fiber optics. To prevent outages due to unforeseen cable damage, all nine of the service providers enter the buildings at different locations.
Hardware issues
All hardware used in the Rackspace data centers is designed and engineered to ensure that there is no downtime even in the event of a hardware failure. All of the storage is RAID-10 which allows for superior performance and redundancy.
We are in a time where downtime is not only an inconvenience, it is unacceptable!
Let Segue Technologies help you provide the quality of service you deserve by visiting us at www.seguetech.com/contact.
