FlexiScale Suffers 18-Hour Outage

• By theWHIR.com , October 31, 2008

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By Anastasia Tubanos, theWHIR.com

October 31, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- According to reports on Friday, cloud storage provider FlexiScale (www.flexiscale.com), a unit of UK-based web hosting provider Xcalibre (www.xcalibre.co.uk), has been hit with its second outage in two months, leaving some customers without access to their servers for more than 18 hours.

The Register reports that some servers were offline for as long as 24 hours.

Towards the end of August, FlexiScale reportedly went offline for "several days" when an employee accidentally deleted one of the main storage volumes during a system upgrade.

This time, FlexiScale blamed the outage on a "core network failure" and kept customers updated through a status page on Xcalibre's website.

As of 12:24 a.m. GMT on Friday, the company posted: "We are very pleased to inform you that all FlexiScale servers are now operational. We apologize for inconvenience this may have caused you during this outage. A full investigation and update will be done soon regarding this unexpected outage."

XCalibre's CEO Tony Lucas, told The Register in an interview that the outage began at about 5:00 p.m. UK time on Wednesday when "the cloud experienced a near simultaneous switch failure in the switches that connect the storage to the processing nodes."

"This is relatively easy to fix, though you do have to take everything down and restart again," explained Lucas in the interview. "But because of a software limitation in a particular piece of software we use...which only allows you to do one job at a time, so when we have to restart hundreds and hundreds of servers, it takes some time."

As with any outage, customers had their two cents to share on the FlexiScale forums.

One customer who goes by the moniker RichText wrote: "This is a shame... I really wanted to like Flexiscale. I gave it a few chances, but in the end, it just looks a bit too unreliable. If they want to compete with Amazon EC2 or Slicehost (not strictly 'cloud' but very flexibile), then reliability is going to have to improve."

Another one named Flish wrote: "I am angry, very angry, so yes there's some vitriol in here, I was hoping that sleeping on it would dull that, but being that all my servers are still down it hasn't? Why have you not learnt lessons from the last outage, the cause was almost comedy, and I left you to it, but the time it took you to restore was unacceptable. Why have you not learnt?"

However, he later posted that he had received a personal call from Lucas himself and "wanted to shine a little good light into the darkness, and credit Tony for being so open, a refreshing change."

Online storage services have become increasingly popular over the past year and cloud services are reputed to be more resilient. However, outages like these, as well as ones like what Amazon experienced in February, have prompted critics to question the reliability of cloud computing and to set up a backup plan should outages like this ever happen again.

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