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Misco: We're moving to the cloud after yesterday's bit barn meltdown

Good old reliable cloud

Reseller giant Misco has confirmed it will embark on a crash migration program to shift its infrastructure into the cloud - a day after a datacentre meltdown that froze its e-commerce front-end for six hours.

The dash to the cloud while having to maintain a creaking inhouse infrastructure illustrates the dilemma facing traditional box shifters still relying on phones, e-catalogues and their own datacentres to punt on-premise tin to their customers.

As El Reg revealed yesterday, the company’s online transactional engine shuddered to a halt around mid-morning and didn’t get back up and running for another six hours.

Talking to us, European president Simon Taylor said: “We had a server outage that caused corruption of our data centre and the reason we were down for the length of time we were was because we were rebuilding the database and didn’t want to cause customers more problems.”

The back-up server hadn’t transferred over, so the resident techies had to restore the database on a new server to ensure products' prices and the live data feed from distributors were present and correct.

Taylor said the downtime had forced the company to re-think its own IT strategy. “Moving forward we’ll be moving our infrastructure to a cloud platform so we have continuity of service and are not relying on a back-up fail over failing”.

Of course, continuity of service isn’t guaranteed in any cloud services either. Shit happens. Ask any user of Google, AWS, Microsoft et al and they’ve all experienced web issues.

Credit notes are baked into the contracts to compensate businesses for outages, but in the main they do not reflect the true cost of lost productivity, etc.

Misco is itself building a "solutions and services" business to reflect changes in the landscape, so implementing a cloud services could make for a decent test case, if done correctly. ®

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