Posts by techlogik

Black Monday: Office 365 down and out in Europe

Re: A message to all who thought Office 365 was a good idea

Yes, the typical O365 support response goes like this:

"Engineers have confirmed that a recent service update was not successful in updating the localization feature. To mitigate impact, engineers will begin deploying a fix starting this we…"

Or "An environment update had a negative impact on the blah blah..." No real answer, just hot air. Sadly, unless you are an enterprise customer, and willing to spend $30K+ for the support to get a dedicated representative to handle your issues (which, if you only pay for about 60-70 users, or $17K/yr for E3 licensing, how would that even be justified? Instead, you are left to create some online support request where some guy from overseas in Asia returns your call a day or two later and you go around in circles with no response for issues often.

This is the real downside with O365 I've found. As long as it is up/running and just works, don't care. But I ran our internal Exchange server, and still do in a hybrid setup, and I had only 30min downtime during working hours over a typical work year. Patching etc, all done off-hours when staff was not really using the server, and it would bounce pretty quick and people would rarely notice. Smaller operation like us, easy to handle/maintain internal Exchange, but space/backups etc..was all an issue, plus DR recovery/planning led us to O365.

As mentioned, the complete lack of information, channels to gain information of status/issues with the environment is non-existent and lacking severely. That is their biggest fail, amongst breaking little things daily. It is a rarity to log into the portal and not see a yellow "In Extended Recovery" notice for one of the cloud services. They can't seem to stop breaking stuff.

Disk is dead, screeches Violin – and here's how it might happen

Genius

"Flash has endurance problems, because the cells in its blocks wear out with repeated writes." Their approach is genius. Just like light bulb makers. They can make a light bulb that last 100yrs easily you could buy, but, then they can't keep making them to keep revenues alive. A continuous death keeps the process flowing and capitalism alive and well. Disk is dead. All desktops and tablets replaced in our last refresh now have SSD, speed, heat/noise operation way less and sizes are smaller. It will keep leading to smaller, less power consuming devices while improving performance. Is it the fastest technology that is possible? No, but spinning disk are going away in the near future. Rather take a chance of blocks wearing out than a ball bearing spinning for a long time that will always fail eventually itself. Not sure why anybody thinks it is any worse than moving parts concepts.