Comments on: Blackberry outage a storage issue?

By: Beth Pariseau

Beth Pariseau — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 18:42:49 +0000

Brad, appreciate you pointing that out and regret the error. The post has been amended with links referring to the most recent outage.

By: Brad

Brad — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:28:42 +0000

Beth, the C|Net article you refer to describes last year’s outage. It was published April 19, 2007. There is no point in guessing that the cache they are referring to is the cache in a high-end disk storage system.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 01:15:00 +0000

Very interesting post – especially the issue you raised in the last paragraph regarding the changing face of computing, e.g. increased multi-tenancy and data consolidation.

In my opinion, this is a clear example of the need for specialized utility computing services. Blackberry shouldn’t be managing their own storage because it isn’t their area of expertise – they should continue focusing on managing their network, extending their software, and managing communications. The storage question should be abstracted away and solved by an storage service provider (SSP?), a firm that specializes in secure abstract storage at massive scale. An early (very incomplete) example of this is Amazon’s S3 (which, incidentally, would not work well in this specific instance, but is a precursor to the kind of service I’m talking about).