Rackspace goes TITSUP in global outage outrage

Rackspace was hit by a major worldwide outage this morning, which appeared to last for nearly three hours. According to the firm's service status page, engineers became aware of an issue affecting multiple cloud services and ticketing in all regions at 11am GMT. The firm later identified the root cause of the networking …

[IanMoore33]

This is what happens

When businesses are too incompetent to handle technology - they pass it off to another incompetent "cloud service" vendor who doesn't pay the license fee !

[macjules]

Re: This is what happens

No, this is what happens when you fail to check your newly-recruited electrician's resume (CV) and find out that he had only recently been fired by British Airways.

[Lee D]

Ah, cloud provision.

And DRM / licensing.

Who'd have thunk they could be problematic in a large enterprise?

What gets me - why the hell is the ticket system behind the same thing, making it inaccessible if it screws up?

[Christian Berger]

"What gets me - why the hell is the ticket system behind the same thing, making it inaccessible if it screws up?"

Why wouldn't you? That way you won't distracted by people whining that nothing works.

[wolfetone]

In a previous life a charity I worked for had their websites etc with Rackspace, on a dedicated server and paid handsomely for it.

Rackspace, continually, asked if I wanted to move to the cloud. It'd be cheaper etc. I declined every time. When I left under bad terms, I think my assistant/back stabber continued that process. And I'm happy to report that right now, while the Rackspace Cloud is crashing and burning, the charity's websites are still up and going strong.

Pity.

[ksharkey]

CLOUD CLOUD CLOUD! I feel like people don't even know what it means anymore. On Prem Storage Will Never Die. Love the "world will all be in the cloud in 5 years" talk. Events like this make us local storage guys chuckle.

[Roj Blake]

Yesterday dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of local storage guys had their storage go down on them. You won't have heard about it though because the individual events were too small to be newsworthy.

[Doctor Syntax]

"Yesterday dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of local storage guys had their storage go down on them."

And they'd have had control over fixing it. Don't undervalue control.

[Anonymous Coward]

So the charity made more during the 3 hours outage than it would have saved over all that time on the cheaper cloud plan? I'm glad you don't manage my finances..

[wolfetone]

"So the charity made more during the 3 hours outage than it would have saved over all that time on the cheaper cloud plan? I'm glad you don't manage my finances.."

The type of charity I worked for exists as a charity in order to not pay taxes. They don't really give anything back to the wider community no matter how much they say they do, because their members don't agree with helping or including those from various parts of society they deem "common".

I can't say any more than that, otherwise I would give the name of the charity away and you can all see how that would end.

[Anonymous Coward]

So the charity made more during the 3 hours outage than it would have saved over all that time on the cheaper cloud plan? I'm glad you don't manage my finances..

What makes you think the cloud plan was cheaper? In all of the cases I've looked at, it actually works out more expensive than properly managed dedicated hosting (once you've factored in all the RAM/storage/CPU cycles/whatever else they conjure up to charge extra for).

[a_yank_lurker]

The Cloud

The cloud giveth and the cloud taketh away. Or today's forecast; cloudy with a 10-20% chance of an outage.

[John 104]

I'd like to know who the load balancer vendor is. Any equipment that just says fuck off because it is out of license is something that I'll never buy. No support because that expired, well, that's just a gamble that something won't go sideways, but it should still work regardless...

[Jim Mitchell]

load balancer? The article clearly said "cloud balancers". I don't even know what that is...

[Anonymous Coward]

As mentioned by a commenter further down, from the ADX info on the Rackspace website, it seems like Brocade.

[Pen-y-gors]

Rackspace?

Would this be the same Rackspace who charge a hefty wack to provide 'Professional' hosting and are proud of "Offering You Expertise Across The World's Leading Clouds"

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Rackspace?

They don't need u in it.

"Offering You Expertise Across The World's Leading Clods"

[IanMoore33]

Forecast calls for pain

from the Clouds

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, from my sick bed I wondered what was going on with our website today. Of course not being paid when off sick I cared not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Terrible design

No software or hardware on the planet should fail like this due to a licensing problem. Raise alerts, call home, log for audit - sure. But to kill functionality is inexcusable.

[fredesmite]

Re: Terrible design

Business is business to make money - it is not a charity ; even in high tech - there are no freebies . I would like to know if RS is liable for these outages and what it will cost them due to their neglect .

[Amos1]

Re: Terrible design

You've never heard of the subscription model, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the event of a Load Balancer failure

"In the event of a Load Balancer failure, the system shall failover to a partner device resulting in less than 30 (thirty) seconds of Load Balancer unavailability" link

'You can use the Dedicated Load Balancer API to manage the following load balancer models. F5 BIG-IP 1600 2000 series, ADX 1000' link

'Organizations can quickly increase performance and port capacity, as well as add advanced features to the Brocade ADX 1000 Series switches, with a simple software license upgrade that supports the “pay-as-yougrow” deployment strategy.'

F5 Server Error: 'Well, this is a bit awkward. This page is undergoing some maintenance and should be back up and running soon. In the mean time, visit support, contact us or return to the home page'

[Gareth Holt]

Re: In the event of a Load Balancer failure

Thanks for the SLA link. Shame that as the cloud load balancers are so cheap that even though we had about 5 affected (which took down our main web sites) the rebate will be pretty insignificant. Will have to scour the agreement to see if any other clauses apply.

[Bob Hoskins]

There is no cloud

Just somebody else's computer.

[Matt Bradley]

Not over yet

Over the past few days, we've had disks on various Rackspace cloud devices become inaccessible. It is not over yet...