time
Storage? I am Storage!
From Australia, Jeremy Howard runs an international email provider. FastMail.fm has servers in the US and Europe, staff in Australia, the US, Europe and India, and customers in 168 countries (Australia only accounts for 6 per cent).
At 11 o'clock one Sunday morning in Melbourne, he received a page and a fax from software monitoring FastMail's hard drives in a Manhattan data center. One of the drives had failed. It was 9pm Saturday in New York.
The RAID configuration meant that no data was lost, and there was a spare drive in a cupboard not far from the faulty unit.
Howard, however, was 16,710 kilometers away, sitting with his wifi-connected laptop on a couch in his unit overlooking Port Phillip Bay. He logged in to the New York server via SSH, and used IBM's ServeRAID command-line utility IPSSEND to flash the light on the broken drive. Then he logged on to the data center's website and wrote out a ticket asking support staff to replace the drive indicated by the flashing light with the one in the cupboard. Five minutes later, he got a confirmation that they had replaced the drive - a fact he was able to confirm through IPSSEND.
That left Howard without a back-up drive in the cupboard. So he went to IBM's website and filled out a ticket there with the serial number of the drive. He has a contract with IBM, much like the one with the data center, for rapid action on faults.
IBM would have a spare drive delivered within two hours. But that was where Howard had a minor hiccup. The web form required him to provide a US telephone number. He didn't have one.
What he did, instead, was to go another website, j2.com, which provides unified communications and phone numbers around the world. Howard already had an Australian number, through which he receives faxes. He pays $15 a month for that. Free of charge and, in a matter of minutes, he obtained a US telephone number, which he inserted into the web form.
Half an hour later, the FastCheck program that monitors FastMail email notified Howard that he had an email. It was a j2 voicemail recording from a UPS delivery agent standing outside the data centre with the new drive.
Howard sent an email to the tech support desk and rang the agent - using his discount calling card offering 2.5 cents per minute to the US - to let her know someone was on the way. From the first page to delivery of the drive, the entire procedure took about an hour - and the major issue, physical replacement of the faulty drive, was completed within 10 minutes. Howard didn't have to leave the couch.
By Charles Wright
At 11 o'clock one Sunday morning in Melbourne, he received a page and a fax from software monitoring FastMail's hard drives in a Manhattan data center. One of the drives had failed. It was 9pm Saturday in New York.
The RAID configuration meant that no data was lost, and there was a spare drive in a cupboard not far from the faulty unit.
Howard, however, was 16,710 kilometers away, sitting with his wifi-connected laptop on a couch in his unit overlooking Port Phillip Bay. He logged in to the New York server via SSH, and used IBM's ServeRAID command-line utility IPSSEND to flash the light on the broken drive. Then he logged on to the data center's website and wrote out a ticket asking support staff to replace the drive indicated by the flashing light with the one in the cupboard. Five minutes later, he got a confirmation that they had replaced the drive - a fact he was able to confirm through IPSSEND.
That left Howard without a back-up drive in the cupboard. So he went to IBM's website and filled out a ticket there with the serial number of the drive. He has a contract with IBM, much like the one with the data center, for rapid action on faults.
IBM would have a spare drive delivered within two hours. But that was where Howard had a minor hiccup. The web form required him to provide a US telephone number. He didn't have one.
What he did, instead, was to go another website, j2.com, which provides unified communications and phone numbers around the world. Howard already had an Australian number, through which he receives faxes. He pays $15 a month for that. Free of charge and, in a matter of minutes, he obtained a US telephone number, which he inserted into the web form.
Half an hour later, the FastCheck program that monitors FastMail email notified Howard that he had an email. It was a j2 voicemail recording from a UPS delivery agent standing outside the data centre with the new drive.
Howard sent an email to the tech support desk and rang the agent - using his discount calling card offering 2.5 cents per minute to the US - to let her know someone was on the way. From the first page to delivery of the drive, the entire procedure took about an hour - and the major issue, physical replacement of the faulty drive, was completed within 10 minutes. Howard didn't have to leave the couch.
By Charles Wright
