(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Major clothing store American Eagle Outfitters (www.ae.com) suffered an outage late last month, which sources say can be attributed to outsourced managed hosting, despite reportedly well-laid recovery plans for just such a disaster.
American Eagle’s online shops, ae.com, aerie.com and 77kids.com, crashed on July 19, and remained offline until July 23, when many of the pages became available, but sluggish, until the afternoon July 27, when the sites were restored to normal, reported industry news site StorefrontBacktalk.
An unnamed source involved in the probe told StorefrontBacktalk that the outage, involved unusual storage failures with IBM’s hosting, and to make matters worse, contingency plans fell through with the Oracle backup utility not functioning as expected. “Probably a one-in-a-million possibility, but it happened,” the source said.
In a July 22 post to Facebook, the company wrote: “We had a few glitches but we’re back! We missed you while we were gone.” To compensate customers, AEO announced free shipping for all purchases from July 22 to 26 within the US and Canada.
This massive failure involving the outsourced hosting has sparked some discussion about the implications of outsourcing large online retail operations without periodically checking up on these service providers.
StorefrontBacktalk’s Frank Hayes notes that it appears that IBM followed best practices, and it appears that the downtime was a fluke. “The retailer and IBM, its hosting provider, had the right plan for dealing with an outage. Disk drive fails? Storage array recovers automatically. Second drive in the array fails? A quick restore brings the data back. Complete failure at the main datacenter? Switch to the backup site. The plan should have been bulletproof. Instead, it was a failure at every level, and American Eagle was crippled for more than a week,” Hayes wrote.
He suggests that while it’s very unlikely — or nearly impossible — that such a disaster would happen under best-practices, there is a possibility that an outsourcer was not as careful. This could mean that some of the money that an online retailer saves from cutting back its in-house IT budget may go to individuals responsible to checking up on outsourced operations.
Hayes concluded, “[I]n the wake of American Eagle’s crash, it’s a tradeoff you can’t afford not to make.”
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