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
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