Stratus wins, again …
Now I make it a policy not to use this blog as a soapbox for my employer, Stratus Technologies. Rather, I aim for it to be a forum for discussing all things availability…
Yet. here I am, the second time in a week, pushing Stratus’ achievements: for the second year running, Stratus has received the NorthFace ScoreBoard Award(SM) for outstanding customer service.
Hurrah!
This award is rated solely by customers so is the objective benchmark for excellence in customer service.
Omega created the award in 2000 to recognise organisations “who offer not only exemplary service to their customers, but who also centre their existence on a deep commitment to exceeding customer expectations.” More than 250 projects, many international in scope, were judged from scores of companies in the US and abroad. From this group, 28 companies qualified to receive the award. Stratus qualified for the NorthFace ScoreBoard Award in the categories of support, field service, account management and customer training. Companies have to score 4.0 or above out of a possible 5.0 to qualify for the award.
Exceptional customer support is the foundation of the entire Stratus organisation. Our most recent quarterly customer survey found that 98% of respondents reported that Stratus meets/exceeds expectations; 71% of respondents fell into “exceeds” category.
So, I was wondering: what does good customer service look like to you?
Filed under: Availability | Leave a Comment
Tags: Northface ScoreBoard Award, Stratus Technologies
Who do you go to for server virtualisation?
Well, check out CRN’s 2012 Virtualization 100 and you’ll learn that you can’t do much better than Stratus:
“Stratus solutions provide uptime assurance beyond virtualization. FtServer platforms eliminate server downtime, critical to protecting VM densities, infrastructure management product and apps deployed on VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V.”
Enough said?
Filed under: Virtualization | Leave a Comment
Tags: ftserver, server downtime, server virtualization
More here on the cloud and the potential downtime impact.
It discusses how most cloud providers are relegating customer service (and therefore overall satisfaction) to secondary importance.
The technical solution behind this statement is that these infrastructures are built for recovery from failure, not failure prevention.
The mindset is to build cheap and on a massive scale, assuming failure will happen and setting customer expectations accordingly.
So long as you know, I guess that that is ok. Well, so long as you’ve thought through the consequences that is.
You could of course, look for an alternative solution, one that is designed with uptime assurance in mind.
Filed under: Uptime | Leave a Comment
Tags: Cloud, Downtime, microsoft, mission critical, uptime
This is just what you don’t want when selling some surplus items on an auction site.
Even though eBay is offering compensation to its customers, who knows what their item might have sold for if the site had been up and running normally? Or how many customers who might have kept coming back will just not bother?
Downtime costs more than just money. The points raised and statistics quoted by Dave Laurello in this piece are well worth absorbing, remembering, tweeting and sharing by whatever means necessary.
Cutting to the chase, the main point is this:
It is very, very easy to, in a very, very short space of time, totally, totally trash a brilliant reputation that has taken years to gently, gently establish.
There is no ‘going, going gone’ when it comes to reputation in today’s electronic environment. There is just ‘gone’.
Yes, I know I’m repeating myself. Yes, I know I’ve said it before and you know I’ll say it again (probably tomorrow):
Downtime costs. Uptime matters …
Filed under: Uptime | Leave a Comment
Tags: Availability, Reputation management, uptime
Microsoft takes on Dropbox with major SkyDrive update.
Lots of reports and blogs on t’internet recently about Microsoft’s changes and additions to Windows SkyDrive. I have used SkyDrive and Mesh for a while now and if ever there was a cloud service that needed to be available all the time, I guess this is it, due to the large number of users that could be affected.
Remember my competition a few blogs back as to how many users had been affected by downtime?
So what do you use – SkyDrive, Dropbox, SugarSync (never iCloud though)?
I’ve used them all but cannot decide which is best. What do you think is best and have you ever suffered cloud downtime?
Come on share your views and stories. Uptime matters …
Filed under: Uptime | Leave a Comment
Tags: Availability, Cloud downtime, Dropbox, Mesh, SugarSync, Windows SkyDrive
So more leaks about Google G Drive …
“Availability: 99.9% uptime guarantee so you can be assured that your documents are accessible when you need it.”
Sorry to rant, but this does not make sense. What happens if I need the data in the 8 hours and 46 minutes downtime that this creates?
And when will the 8 hour window happen during the year?
Of course no one knows except Mr. Sod, whose law states that it will happen when, and only when, you desperately need the data.
Oh dear.
Filed under: Uptime | Leave a Comment
Tags: Availability, Google G Drive, uptime
We Want More Uptime!
Oh no! More downtime from some biggish names – 30,000 affected at Sage Pay and 600,000 at ZoneEdit.
Still pails into insignificance compared to Google’s 30M or so, although a 5 day outage is even beating Blackberry!
And talking about Google, what has happened to their new G Drive that was announced yesterday, the day after Microsoft published its significant changes to Skydrive? I pressed the button to get my G drive this morning but they are going to email me when my G drive is ready. Upon Googling Google’s G Drive I learnt there were issues, and it’s not just for Mac Users either – I simply utilise a humble PC.
All this downtime is sending negative waves across our industry.
We want more uptime. We want uptime assurance!
Filed under: Uptime | Leave a Comment
Tags: uptime, uptime assurance
So Google goes down,whoops!
I think I am going to start a competition to do with downtime – there will be two categories.
Firstly the biggest impact, either on a reputational basis or financial impact. I nominate Blackberry, though maybe the UK Post Office is a contender
The second category will simply be the highest numbers of users affected – any advance on Google with 30 million users?
Come on, join in on the competition!
Uptime matters …
Filed under: Uptime | Leave a Comment
Tags: Availability, Downtime, systems recovery, uptime
The ramblings of Mr Pott always bring a smile to my face and this one, exploring the evil empire and protracted death spirals of various industries, is no exception.
As an aside, I have no idea how Trevor finds the time to write this stuff (isn’t he supposed to be sys-adminning?) but it is much appreciated. Anyway …
My attention was caught with the IT stuff that starts half way through – oracle, hp, apple cisco – I would be interested in what you think.
I have been a long believer in x86, commodity operating systems, virtualisation – these are the substantive technologies that you can deploy right now to give fantastic flexibility.
And if you are worried about the resiliency – just search for ‘uptime assurance’ and worry no more.
Filed under: Uptime | Leave a Comment
Tags: uptime assurance, virtualisation, Virtualization, X86
I guess it is no surprise to see a bit of a droop in UK server sales in Q4 due to the current economics and disk drive shortages …
Here are some interesting nuggets from Nathaniel at IDC though, especially about vastly shrinking unix deployments, which are being replaced by a more flexible X86 architecture.
Has it really taken this long for some of our distinguished IT departments to cotton onto this?
Also amused that mainframes provide the ultimate resilience – fault tolerant X86 servers have provided the same for many years now, running commercially available operating systems and virtualisation platforms.
Please, distinguished IT departments, don’t take so long this time to realise that huge cost savings came be made and that uptime can be assured on X86 – you need not go out and buy a mainframe.
Filed under: Uptime | Leave a Comment
Tags: Fault-Tolerance, UK server sales, virtualisation, Virtualization, X86
Who is the Availability Advisor?
Andy Bailey is Availability Architect at Stratus Technologies.
When not blogging about High Availability, Continuous Availability and Fault Tolerance, he enjoys fast cars and relaxing with his Pipe Organ.
Twitter: @AndyStratus
Linkedin: Andy Bailey
Availability Advisor
Recent Entries
- Stratus wins, again …
- Who do you go to for Server Virtualisation?
- Microsoft’s Biggest Cloud Deployment: Putting Customers Last?
- Downtime Costs eBay’ Customers their Reputation
- Dropbox or SkyDrive update: Which is best?
- 99.95 uptime = 8 hours, 46 minutes downtime a year: is this what you want, really?
- We Want More Uptime!
- Google or Blackberry, who wins the downtime award?
- Time for Big Content to take responsibility?
- UK server-makers weather Q4 sales droop
- Is there a best way to set up your private cloud storage?
Categories
- Availability (39)
- Awards (1)
- Banking (2)
- Blackberry (1)
- Business Continuity (8)
- Case Studies (2)
- Cloud (14)
- Clusters (4)
- Continuous Availability (17)
- Database (1)
- Double-Take (1)
- Downtime (8)
- Fault-Tolerance (46)
- ftserver (2)
- Hard drive performance (1)
- High Availability (19)
- Hosting (1)
- Maeslantkering (1)
- Manufacturing (1)
- Microsoft (1)
- Microsoft Exchange Server (3)
- OCS (1)
- Osterman (1)
- payment solutions (1)
- Podcasts (2)
- Predictions (1)
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux (1)
- Reviews (1)
- Risk Awareness (1)
- SME (2)
- Stratus Technologies (3)
- Uncategorized (29)
- Uptime (35)
- Virtualization (43)
- Webinar (1)
- Windows Server 2003 (1)
- ZDNet (1)
Archives
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- June 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- November 2007
- October 2007
