- Spare Parts – Why were there not enough spare parts on hand at the data centre to immediately affect repairs? This is non-negotiable for the modern facility. Infrastructure is not perfect, so the means must always be available to immediately repair it when there is a failure.
- Resilience – Global networking in the modern era requires networks with built-in resilience and redundancy. Why was this not already in place at MTN? Even a basic amount of resilience could have provided uninterrupted service for customers, even as repairs were made.
- Communications – MTN customers complained that communications from the company were lacking. For their part, MTN said the outage affected the same portions of the data centre hosting their communications tools. They were unable to effectively communicate until the first round of repairs had been started. But why? Should the company not have alternate means of communication in place?
Service Providers
The environment in South Africa may be such that data centre customers do not have many options in terms of service providers. In the UK, we have no such problem. Therefore, one of the lessons to be learned here is that of choosing a service provider wisely. It is no longer acceptable to work with a data centre that does not have proven uptime of 98% to 99%. It is also not acceptable for service providers to not have immediate repair capabilities. Choose your provider wisely; the health of your business could depend on it. Sources: 1. http://mybroadband.co.za/news/hosting-storage/125490-load-shedding-wipes-out-mtn-data-centre.html 2. http://mybroadband.co.za/news/hosting-storage/125460-major-mtn-gallo-manor-data-centre-outage.html
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