Monday, October 12, 2009

Sidekicks and a Danger-eous Cloud

I think we have our first major cloud incident and nobody knows how to handle it. T-Mobile customers in the United States using Sidekick devices might not be the biggest fans of T-Mobile's approach of handling data with cloud computing. T-Mobile has outsourced it's Sidekick services to a company called Danger, which is owned by Microsoft. Sidekick devices heavily use the network and offside storage. The network storage devices used to store Sidekick data at Danger are manufactured by Hitachi.

Microsoft, Hitachi, and T-Mobile all big names but the information that leaked out does not show much professionalism. Hitachi was tasked to update Danger's network storage devices. According to an Engadget article, without a data backup or a working back-out plan that update went quite wrong. Some of the data stored by T-Mobile's Sidekick users has been deleted.

Even days later the overall system is still not stable and T-Mobile advises individuals to not turn-off their devices. Even sales of Sidekicks are on hold.

I guess cloud computing is in Danger.

Read more at:
Engadget
New_york Times

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