Fasthosts downed by dicky Dell switch A number of websites were taken offline yesterday, and remained down this morning, after a load of servers run by Gloucester-based hosters Fasthosts fell over. Services on the hosting side are back up now, but the outage provoked angry responses. It was a faulty Dell switch that took the servers out, Fasthosts CEO Andy Burton …
Second post and you're the first to suggest that a system you've never seen or heard of before has no redundancy.
One switch can take down a redundant system. The only thing that you can be sure of in a system is that the system will fail, everything else is merely a probability.
You can have an intended redundant design which turns out not to be.
You can have an intermittent failure which creates more traffic negotiating the failover than one switch can handle, making the system grind to a halt.
You can get a split brain scenario where both switches think the other is in charge.
These are off the top of my head... You could argue that you don't have a redundant system if it doesn't failover properly, but I'd counter that by saying you have a redundant system which didn't work.
I'm afraid you didn't read the question properly.
I said one switch GOING DOWN cannot take down a redundant design and if If one switch GOING DOWN takes down your network, you do not have a redundant design, you do not have redundancy, and asked for correction of this statement if you disagree.
You suggested scenarios where switches generate spurious network traffic, or split brain scenarios. Neither of which are a switch going down.
Fasthosts said "The switch tech that WENT DOWN comes from Dell; it disconnected the storage and the processors on some of the virtual servers. It was a specific cluster that was impacted."
Failure of a single switch disconnected storage and processors. There was no redundancy to account for for that switch failing. Therefore, it was not a redundant design.
They seem like a good idea - cheap, managed switches from the same supplier as your servers, your racks. Then you start putting traffic through them, relying upon them and then boom, its gone. Cisco kit is expensive, but Cisco kit having spent up on Dell kit first is even more expensive.
Its possible for any vendors switch to have an issue, anything from human error in the code running the switch to something on the network doing something the software doesn't know how to handle can cause unexpected issues.
As its a Cluster running Vm's I believe its been made worse by the host having to restart all the machines again, its affected other hosts not just this one as well btw.
I was one of their "handful" of customers who had their server in read only mode since Sunday night.
The certainly could of kept people better updated - updates were being posted ever few hours - and their twitter feed kept going with marketing tweets - the best two were promoting their "resilient virtual servers" and "The benefits of B2B blogs"
I was reviewing my Fasthosts accounts the other week and decided to move one of them to another ISP as it was cheaper. I submitted the request to cancel the account and a week or so later... poor customer service... they phoned me, asked me why I was cancelling my account and offered to half the cost there and then if I stayed with them. So I did. I've not contacted yet though about reducing the costs of my other accounts.
The cost of hosting must be cheaper these days than it was 10 years ago yet there hasn't been much of a reduction in the cost of the service for customers. Both Fasthosts and Webfusion offer similar products and prices. A bit of a monopoly methinks.
Ha. Not so long back, I contacted these clowns asking them to switch off one of the last two servers we had with them, gave them the unique server name + account number + pin.
Three weeks later, they duly shut down the other one.
When they put it back online, they then forgot to hook up their own backup systems again, so it was running without backups. Utterly amatuerish.
I used to work for Fasthosts, and I have to say, that when the shit hits the fan technically, they really do try to resolve it as quickly as possible.
I know they have a lot of bad press, but from someone that knows the inside scoop, they will have been pulling every resource available to sort the issue out.
Let the downvotes commence!.... :-/
The firmware that Fasthosts applied isnt just a firmware patch. If they are using the Dell 24 port 10Gig switches (rebranded broadcoms from memory) then the new firmware is a full code rewrite.
Re the questions of redundancy, I gather Fasthosts issues were around latency between the VMware hosts and the Storage. This caused weird issues. Having two switches wouldn't help, as technically nothing failed....
Can only but wonder how many of those 127 complaints were from re-sellers?
When I saw the displays on the end wall of the coffee room in the the top floor attic where front line support is located showing the stats for re-sellers signed up that day I knew this was not a firm I wanted to work for and turned them down flat when they offered me a role.
Only just twigged. A marketing guy called me yesterday to find out if I was happy with them. I've had no outage on a Linux DS, unless I managed to miss it.
I've been with them about a month (don't ask), and my major problem at the moment is that I can't talk to any other FastHosts users. It turns out that they closed down their forums a few years ago, and haven't re-opened them. Any forums out there? I'm on webhostchat.co.uk occasionally. Please don't say twitter. Please.
Wouldn't touch them with a barge pole, having wasted hours and hours of time trying to do basic joomla installs with different clients who use them; the same installs all done and dusted within an hour with 1&1, who are no angels, but at least their basic services work at acceptable speeds.
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