Quite a few T-Mobile subscribers are steaming after a recent meltdown of the infrastructure supporting the Sidekick mobile phone, culminating in a dire warning: keep your device powered at all times and do not restart them, or lose all of your data. Apparently Microsoft/Danger, the phone’s developer and data service maintainer, screwed up translating the Mayan calendar, because The End as We Know It isn’t for a few more years.
It’s a classic datacenter horror story — a hardware and/or software failure corrupts data, but by the time it’s noticed, it’s too late; recent backups are toast. Or, to make matters worse, the backups are overwritten so often that there isn’t a backup to restore from. Oh wait, your idea of backups was ten racks of matching RAID-10 SANs to match the ten racks where the production data is stored? Silly rabbit, RAID is for redundancy!
The news coverage keeps calling the Sidekick infrastructure “cloud computing,” that “Web 2.0″ term that’s all about “software as a service” and “thin clients.” One of the cool features of cloud computing is the ability to run applications on the server side — instead of a mail client, word processor, or Photoshop installed on your computer, just hop onto any computer with a browser (though you may need a plugin like Flash here or there) and log on to mail.google.com, officelive.com, or photoshop.com. The application, the data, the processing are all handed “in the cloud,” i.e. through some Internet-facing infrastructure that you only know as the domain name. To you, the user, it doesn’t matter whether they have hundreds of homogenous servers and you’re sitting on (for example) mail1420.google.com versus mail3293.google.com, or if they have separate clusters of application and data servers with clearly-defined tasks; you’re asking for the service, nothing more.
Say it with me: Sidekick is not cloud computing. Never has been, never will. You aren’t free to access it from any Internet-enabled device, which goes against the whole concept of cloud computing being more flexible for the user. So stop calling it a failure of cloud computing.
Where does the blame fall, then? Certainly on Microsoft/Danger, but for a shoddy backup system. As cited in an earlier example, the data corruption would have forced the customer to accept a week-old backup — not acceptable, but at least they could offer a backup. It’s not clear what happened, and Microsoft engineers have told T-Mobile there is an “optimistic” chance of recovery for their users’ data according to The New York Times, but if your first response to a data corruption problem is “I think all of our backups are screwed,” then as the meme goes: Backups, ur doin it wrong. And stop blaming it on the cloud; it wasn’t the one who kicked your kitten and flipped bits on the fiber channel switch.
(By the way, T-Mobile is showing the Sidekick as temporarily out of stock. How surprising.)
