Red-faced VESK scratches '100% uptime' claim after 2-day outage The swagger has gone from hosted desktop and cloud purveyor VESK after its outage seven days ago forced it to remove the 100 per cent uptime claims on its website. A failed hard disk in its Storage Access Network caused a “panic event” on 26 August, the business confirmed to customers early this week, taking down email …
There is no way that you can promise 100% uptime ~ or even ASSume that your IT department will be able to provide your company with 100% uptime when signing a new contract...
And if you sign a contract without being aware of punitive penalties, thinking that these won't apply to you since your IT dept will be able to deliver 100% uptime, then I've got a bridge to sell to you...
100% uptime belongs in LaLa land, or in the lab.
I don't think there's anything wrong with pointing to a previous winning streak of 1500 days of 100% uptime. It's not the same as promising 100% uptime in future.
Although it's obviously embarrassing when the inevitable happens, so whether it's a good idea to advertise that fact is a different question.
"I don't think there's anything wrong with pointing to a previous winning streak of 1500 days of 100% uptime. It's not the same as promising 100% uptime in future."
It's also not the same as continuing to claim 100% uptime after that streak had come to an end even though it might have been a far better record than some others. And then there's always the traditional "small number of customers affected".
Psh. It's very easy to claim 100% uptime, and justify it - you just have to be "creative" in your approach.
"We are proud to announce that we achieved 100% uptime between 4pm on July 9th and 11:27am on August 17th; between 2pm on August 17th and 9:04am on August 18th; and continuously since August 20th.
In fact, we are the only service provider who can boast of over 47 periods of 100% uptime in the last three months!"
Look at their SLA page "The VESK SLA is 99.9%, guaranteeing uptime for 99.9% of the time in any given month. VESK are proud to report that we have maintained 100% uptime for many consecutive months"
[http://www.vesk.com/our-datacentres/the-vesk-sla/]
Their Datacentre page also make for interesting reading - how can they claim all this when a single hard drive failure can bork their whole system and make them switch to an alternate datacentre where a number of servers won't boot.
[http://www.vesk.com/our-datacentres/]
"Internal datacentre resilience
Internally within each server rack in our datacentres we operate n+2 redundancy across our servers. That means a server, or even two servers can fail at any one point in time and new servers are waiting to takeover the faulty servers.
Within our storage architecture we run n+1. That means any storage unit (SAN) can fail and we have immediate failover to another SAN, in fact end users wouldn’t even notice a failure if working on a document.
All networking equipment is mirrored, not only on a per-switch basis, but across multiple network switches. Our firewalls are mirrored resulting in immediate failover in the event of any part of our network failing.
We have multi-honed Internet connectivity into each datacentre from different providers.
We have dual electricity feeds from the National Grid in addition to a third party power supplier. Furthermore we have petrol and diesel generators and operate the only n+2 power datacentre facility in the UK.
We do not have any single points of failure internally within our datacentres."
Well it's happened again!
26th August and now an outage on 26th September. We lost all services at 3am with Exchange Server back up by mid-afternoon but still no hosted desktop. As a small consultancy business communication and access to data are our lifeblood. Going down the hosted desktop route was supposed to be the answer - reliability, reliability, reliability.
The little comfort last time was that it was over a bank holiday weekend - this time we are being crippled!
The website gives a semi-regular but rather bland update that lacks explanation or commitment. "Our engineers have worked through the night.." Good for them - but sorry I don't give a toss about engineer's time sheet entries, I want the service that you promised and which I am so entirely dependent on! The several half-hints at a deadline have each passed, being replaced with either another half-hint and/or a bland statement.
Same time again next month then lads?
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