RackSpace, a web hosting data center based in Dallas had a major power outage yesterday. The outage affected GigaOm, Laughing Squid, 37 Signals, and many others. TechMeme, my favorite blog news aggregator, has lots of blogs following the story.
You might recall a similar massive power outage a few months ago at 365 Main, a major data center in San Francisco. That outage knocked out sites like CraigsList, Technorati, LiveJournal, TypePad, AdBrite, Second Life and Yelp.
You might ask where is the backup power supply? Where are the redundant systems they told me about? Unfortunately, these power outages and unplanned down time happen frequently. Most of these web hosting and data center companies are startups themselves. They don't have the "bullet proof" never fail data centers that you read about.
Business users demand 24 X 7 X 365 uptime. This is why Google and Microsoft are building massive data centers costing $500 million each all over the country. There are only a few companies in the world that have the financial resources to build multiple data centers, and that have the technical skills to keep them running efficiently.
Free services and social networks can get by with some power outages and a few data losses. Users will complain...but life goes on. Not so with business users. There are huge impacts, both financial and legal, when service is interrupted or data is lost.
Software is increasingly moving towards hosted services. Microsoft is working hard to deliver "Software + Services" to give users the best of both worlds. Keeping data synchronized on clients and servers, and delivering a great user experience while on-line and off, is a big challenge.
The Dallas and San Francisco data center crashes may make people stop and think about who they want to trust with their data and services. That is why Microsoft and Google are spending billions on data centers.
