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Microsoft refuses to join the Zero Outage brigade, Google and AWS keep mum

Heads in sand time. If service providers don't admit a problem exists, does it?

Microsoft snubbed an invitation to join a brigade of tech titans that linked arms to work on minimising network crashes that can cripple cloud service availability.

The Zero Outage initiative was launched in November by founding members HPE, Cisco, Brocade, HDS, Dell EMC, Fortinet, Juniper, NetApp, SAP, SUSE, T-Systems and IBM.

The group of old world vendors will try to mitigate technical defects, human errors or untrained process execution.

Tim Wasle, a T-Systems staffer and spokesman for the group said it wanted to “identify and react faster” to technical incompatibilities, by “more complete testing” and “sharing best practises”.

“Anyone is the IT industry that wants to join, it is open. We are looking for additional members, especially in the service provider area,” he said.

Wasle said it had opened the ways for Microsoft to join but received a knock back. “No, so far it is not interested. We asked if it wanted to join the initiative when it was in the early stage at CeBIT this year. I don’t know why they are not interested.”

The same offer had yet to be put to Google or AWS, but “we’d be happy to work with them,” he said.

Microsoft declined an offer from The Register to explain its position and neither Google nor AWS were forthcoming either. Nobody, it seems, yet wants to be associated with an outage group.

Back in 2011, Microsoft admitted that it can’t guarantee 100 per cent uptime, and as world + dog has seen, rivals can’t keep their services up and running all the time either. ®

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