Down the memory hole
- Posted by: JP Smith | October 12, 2009
- Filed Under: Mobile, Communications
Do you hear that sound? It's the echo from the collective wails of the hundreds of thousands of users whose data may have been irrecovably lost due to server failure within T-Mobile network.
As a result, you have a lot of ticked-off customers and T-Mobile's reputation has taken a hit over what I recall as being a relatively trouble-free product, the Sidekick.
If you're not familiar with the issue by now, let me me explain briefly. Over the weekend, T-Mobile experienced a server crash that may have permanently lost the data of some 800,000 Sidekick users. Right now, Sidekick user are being told to not turn off, remove the batteries on their Sideckick or let their batteries drain, lest they lose the data that is currently residing in their phones' local memory.
It appears that this is a shortcoming of the cloud-based computer solution implemented for T-Mobile by Micosoft and a company called Danger (kind of ironic now, huh?). In typical cloud-based setups, it is not unfair to assume redundancy, meaning that one server going down should not wipe out data. But, there's another issue here -- am I to believe that there are not mirrored instances of their databases? I work in corporate IT and we rarely, if ever, just have one instance of a database for a critical system and, of course, we back up data nightly. Trust me, even if you think pictures and text messages aren't that important, if your service includes selling the transfer and storage of these items, you need to recalibrate your thinking.
To me, it's utterly inexcusable that they couldn't fail over to another instance and maybe only lose a few minutes' worth of data. Of course, I know that I am probably being unfair here and not considering the costs associated with implementing such solutions but, I also have to wonder if too many chances were taken because, as their press release stated "(p)ersonal information stored on your device such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger."(emphasis mine).
I am stuck on the phrase a server failure. This means that they are trying to simplify its explanation to non-technical users and not saying that the issues was actually larger or, and I have to take their word for this, a single server failed and this mess is the end-result.
As a T-Mobile customer, I am greatly concerned. What if the next failure has to do with servers related to making an outbound calls during an emergency? Maybe that's extreme but, if the infrastructure is not right in one place, it could be a problem in another.
Correction: I mentioned a server crash being over the weekend. I neglected to mention that this was on top of the week-and-a-half-long outage experienced by many Sidekick owners right before this incident occurred.
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