RIM's Single Point of Failure 12 comments
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I've got to chime in with Jon Gruber of Daring Fireball on this: No matter how much Research in Motion (RIMM) promotes their NOC approach to running its Blackberry service, it's still a single point of failure for all Blackberry subscribers. And given that this weakness has been demonstrated to Blackberry subscribers with two multi-hour outages in the last 11 months, at some point, businesses are going to scream "Fix it!" I'm surprised someone from the high-availability computing world hasn't pilloried RIM already.
For those who don't think RIM's outages are any big deal, here's a fun fact. If RIM were trying to meet a 99.999% availability for its Blackberry service, the three-hour outage on February 12, 2008 would have used up its allowed downtime for the next 34 years. Oops.
It's easy to forget that until the Internet came along and demonstrated that distributed and decentralized networks really were more reliable, most of the major computer companies built networks with centralized command and control systems, yet those networks never achieved anything like the resilience of the Internet. It's a shame Anywhere business customers using Blackberrys are going to have to learn that lesson again the hard way. It's not a question of if that will happen; it's a question of when.
Meanwhile, everyone who wants to avoid the Anywhere school of hard knocks should repeat after me:
I will not accept single points of failure in my Anywhere service. I will not accept single points of failure in my Anywhere service. I will not accept single points of failure in my Anywhere service.
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This article has 12 comments:
If you are going to pump your stock by criticizing another, at lease have the common courtesy to state your long positions. I expect better from Seeking Alpha! www.thestreet.com/_yah...;cm_cat=FREE&c...
For the record, I'm long both AAPL and RIMM.
and......by the record. I don't use anything in the technological that doesn't go down at least twice per month and that includes satellite, cable, wireless and whatever else being foisted on the U.S. consumer complete with glitches.
You must not work in corporate America..i.e. a fortune 500 company where things like down time for systems of any kind happen at least 4-5 times in any year. I have and employees exalt these times as favor from above.
That being said, I believe this piece is comedy. RIM's "single point of failure" could be compared to iPhone's "single" point of failure if EDGE on ATT were to go down and one didn't have wifi access. Then what?
RIM's long term service reliability speaks for itself and as one poster above noted, the core system is extremely reliable with outages only occurring when upgrades or tweaks are being applied. This doesn't excuse the outage, but it is a noteworthy point, that the core system just tends to work (kind of like a Mac!). No doubt I do hope RIM increases the number of NOCs from 2 to 4 or 8 to achieve redundancies on top of redundancies. It should be noted, though, that there currently is a third secretly located NOC for certain customers that require 100% uptime (read US gov't) that was put in place after the outage last year.
I'm long both AAPL and RIMM because it obvious to see the growth of smartphone adoption worldwide is huge and both are positioned in the space to benefit. (There are many more reasons than iPhone to own AAPL, but that's for another time)