| Level 3 Network Outage Pattern Affects Customers
Level 3 Power Outages Expose Network Continuity
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Internet Data Center)
Firms relying on data center service provider Level 3 should beware, after
a spate of high-profile outages
July 25, 2006 -
Recent power outages at two separate Level 3 data centers have highlighted
the necessity for firms to implement effective business continuity
measures, and for IT managers to be more discerning about their
service providers' back-up plans, according to experts.
On Sunday an Internet data center in North London belonging to
service provider Level 3 Communications suffered a power cut which
lasted around six hours, while in the US, popular social networking
site MySpace went down after the same problem affected its Los
Angeles data centre. UK Yahoo users also went without email and
instant messaging services after a power failure.
Guy Bunker, chief scientist at Symantec, commented that the MySpace
incident shows that firms must evolve their business continuity
plans as they grow and consumer demand and expectation increases,
and for global enterprises, " multiple data centers must be in place
should anything go wrong".
The Level 3 outage affected many firms, including IT Week publisher
VNU, leaving customer websites out of action for up to 12 hours.
According to virtual network operator Mnet, which uses the Level 3
data centre, the firm's uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) failed
to start up when the local power substation suffered an outage.
Alan Rodger of analyst Butler Group said that firms must carefully
consider the cost of their services going offline, against the cost
of investing in solutions that provide more secure back-up
procedures. "Customers should ask for back-up in their service level
agreements (SLAs) because that level of outage is pretty
unacceptable," he argued. "Hosting companies could provide
switch-over to other Internet data center facilities at a cost."
Graham Titterington of Ovum added that IT managers should be more
discerning when asking their service providers what business
continuity measures they have in place, and make other arrangements
if these are not consistent with their firms' plans. "It's like IT
security in that it's often a case of 'out of sight out of mind',"
he argued. "If they outsource the [problem] firms think they can
then forget about it."
But Mike Tobin, chief executive of Internet data center operator
Telecity Redbus, said that some customers have unrealistic
expectations of their hosting service providers, especially given
that many Internet data centers are reaching their capacity and
heating up.
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