I recently had the experience of having to run down the cause of a few clients not being able to access their email systems.\u00a0 I quickly learned that the servers which hosted those email systems had been taken down by the hosting company.\u00a0 Further checking revealed that the issue was a failure of a large multiply redundant array.\u00a0 This was not the failure of a single drive nor even that of a single array; but, rather, it was a simultaneous failure of two synchronized arrays.\u00a0 The likelihood of such a failure would seem to be astronomically rare; but, it was the second such failure in this particular data center in just over 2 years.\u00a0 Because of the size and complexity of the arrays, it took over 8 hours to get a full backup and then another 16 hours to build a replacement array and restore the data before the servers could start to be brought back online (and the hosted email systems to become accessible once again).<\/p>\n
This event highlights an important point about trusting the cloud to securely protect your personal or business data.\u00a0 The cloud does represent a far more reliable storage technique than your hard drive in your computer but it is not perfect; failures can and do happen.\u00a0 As a result, I continue to recommend that all users of electronic devices personally backup their data and store the media in a cool, dry, safe location.\u00a0 Backup often (any time you have worked an amount that you do not want to have to repeat) using appropriate media (CD’s, DVD’s, USB sticks, button drives, etc.).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I recently had the experience of having to run down the cause of a few clients not being able to access their email systems.\u00a0 I quickly learned that the servers which hosted those email systems had been taken down by the hosting company.\u00a0 Further checking revealed that the issue was a failure of a large … Continue reading “Data Centers are not perfect”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/benediktson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/benediktson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/benediktson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benediktson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benediktson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/benediktson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48,"href":"http:\/\/benediktson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions\/48"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/benediktson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benediktson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benediktson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}