Salesforce.com network experiences short outage

Cloud computing may be all the rage, but Salesforce.com's temporary outage shows that hosted applications are far from perfect. On Tuesday, 68,000 customers of the Software as a Service (SaaS) company were without the service for over an hour.  

Salesforce.com attributed the network outage to a failure in its data center that affected both its regular operations and backup systems. The particular cause for the network outage was what it called a "storage tier anomaly." Because tiered storage shifts data to various devices depending on need, an "anomaly" is the result of something like a SAN outage.

While it's unknown what Salesforce.com will have to pay out in fines to affected customers, Jeff Kaplan, managing director at THINKstrategies, a Massachusetts-based SaaS and IT consultancy said that "unless it proves to be a pattern that shows a decline in reliability, people will give them a mulligan."  

For more:
- SearchCloudComputing.com has this article [1]

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