Salesforce.com users lament ongoing outages

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Downtime happens: As someone who builds, operates and supports these type of systems I can tell you there are going to be down times. But there would be down time if the application was company managed at the home office. The head office users might be able to access the system, but that doesn't help the field agents. There isn't anything connected to the internet that's going to be available 100% of the time. The alternative is desktop apps, but there will be down time for those as well and desktop support costs are order of magnitudes higher.

Having said that...critical services being offline for 7 hours is completely unsat. That was a major fumble. The worst outage any of my customers have ever experienced is 80 minutes and that was a shocking and near unbelievable series of compound failures of the primary and hot spare during peak load (of course). The 90 minutes represents the time it took us to stand up a new application server and synchronize the database replication. So to be offline for 7 hours, someone really cratered.

The more critical your web apps, the more you need to look at things like regional and local servers. But every time you add a box it's a potential point of failure. More data replications, fatter exception logs, higher support costs...it's an never ending balancing act that has to change with the company.

Unfortunately there aren't any painless solutions. Though I can say running a system on open standards that scales easily and provides flexibility on license options makes life much easier. Yes, that means F/OSS. I'm sure that will get the fanboys spooled up but it's the truth. For web based applications and services stay away from MSFT.; Posted by: Chad_z Posted on: 02/01/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use