Microsoft still reviving Azure SQL Reporting after MONDAY FAIL
'Procedural operations error' leads to lengthy cloud cleanup
Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery
Four days have passed since a "procedural operations error" downed Azure SQL Reporting in Microsoft's East US data center, and Redmond is still trying to restore customer data.
After saying on Thursday that full restoration from Monday's fail would have occurred by Friday, the recovery date has slipped again, according to updates posted by the company to the Windows Azure Service Dashboard.
No data was harmed in the incident, but getting it back is taking a long time.
"Restoration progress continues," Redmond wrote at 9am PST. "Current estimated recovery time has been extended slightly to 2/16/2013 at 12:00 AM UTC. We will provide updates if this recovery time changes. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers."
It is taking longer than expected to restore everything because "the engineering team needs to take specific and necessary steps to ensure full data recovery on the affected cluster," Microsoft's director of comms for the server and tools business, Cori Hartje told The Reg in an e-mailed response to our queries.
The answers indicate that something may have gone wrong with a bit of data-center hardware, as Hartje notes that: "Microsoft writes multiple replicas of user data to multiple devices ensuring the data is still available even if single or multiple catastrophic hardware failures take place."
Microsoft is not restoring the data from tape, she said.
Microsoft expects to have brought everything back by tomorrow. After that, affected customers can contact Azure support for a root-cause analysis, the company said. ®
COMMENTS
What I considered to be really funny...
Is that the (IMO: self-proclaimed) "experts" on El Reg's chat this afternoon (regarding Win Server 2012) were quite specific when it came to Azure and its development model. I quote:
"Alun Rogers: Maybe this is more of a joining up with Azure release schedules? They iterate that like crazy"
And also:
"MJF: I think this move helps put MSFT's "Cloud OS" campaign into more context. The idea is Win Server should be the best OS for building/supporting cloud services. If that's true, it needs to be evolving in lockstep with Azure, not lagging it feature-wise for years at a time"
The topic at hand during these quotes was "Blue"; the assumed new setup where Microsoft pushes out new software more or less continuously (and on a subscription bases I might add) instead of releasing major versions.
It would appear as if both guests had no clue - what so ever - regarding the current dire state of Azure, something which IMO speaks for itself when reading the quotes. I shudder at the thought of a Windows server being released / developed at a quick pase as Azure, not merely for the current state Azure is in, but the idea in general scares me considering how Microsoft still firmly holds the reputation that a v1.0 release is usually filled with bugs and other nasty stuff.
Yet these two seemed to think that it would be the most ideal situation for customers to be in. Are you kidding me?
Now, this maybe a little bit of a cheap shot on my part, sure, but now taking the current state Azure is in into mind combined with the fact that they haven't been able to fix this within a whole week I'd say its safe to conclude that hasty releases on Enterprise level aren't the brightest of ideas.
Of course I'm no expert :-)
Microsoft IS a tech disaster....
The story of my life with Microsoft.
"No data was harmed in the incident, but getting it back is taking a long time."
Well actually the data was totally fucked up, and getting it back is taking even longer than a long time... but yes, the statement is mostly correct.
Linux = Reliability.
Data in clouds
"Microsoft writes multiple replicas of user data to multiple devices ensuring the data is still available even if single or multiple catastrophic hardware failures take place"
There are two problems here. One, the outage means that Azure users are suck in limbo. Two - even if the data is available, data collation happens in real time and any disruption to it can cause real problems. The customer has to put into place work arounds.
That Azure is not resilient or robust to a "hardware" failure (if that happened) means that Azure is not fit to be a cloud system. The whole point of the cloud is that it is supposed to work, regardless of hardware failures (data being replicated between physical sites).
Windows is not ready for the data centre. And never will be. It is not robust. It is not resilient. It is not scalable.
AZURE EPIC FAIL!
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
What you need to know about cloud backup
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Top 10 SIEM implementer’s checklist
