The economy has heaved a sigh of relief after good sales reports from the Thanksgiving weekend. Have you stopped to really think about the importance of reliable IT systems and business continuity during this and other key sales events?
A company really may live or die according to what it or its service provider does in preparation for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The game is in the hands of the technicians more and more every year.
While these two days can herald great things during a good year, they can also seem like harbingers of doom if things don't go so well. Their grim-sounding names are oddly appropriate, and everyone watches with trepidation.
• Black Friday. Very ominous, evoking images of stock market crashes and other disasters. A few decades ago it came to mean "the day after Thanksgiving in which retailers make enough sales to put themselves 'into the black ink'" [source] which is actually a good thing.
• Cyber Monday. Sounds like something from The Terminator. Actually… "The term 'Cyber Monday' was coined in 2005 by Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Federation [source]." This is the Monday after Thanksgiving, when online sales show a significant spike. Cyber Monday has become a major shopping day and economic indicator in its own right.
Jittery analysts are poised every year with their thumb on the Recession Early Warning button, ready to sound the alarm if the score doesn't add up and the game goes badly. (I think they secretly enjoy this.)
It's All IT's Fault. But No Pressure, Guys! : )
Every year in advance of this season opener, IT Managers beg for money to upgrade servers, replace old circuit breakers and backup batteries, service the cooling systems, and do a thousand other things to help prop up their networks for the onslaught. They also stock up on the coffee, donuts, and Valium that will keep them going through long days and even longer nights of watching, waiting, rebooting, hot swapping, and occasionally panicking over system crashes and failovers. I do not envy them, as the fate of the economy apparently rests upon their shoulders.
If the IT systems go down the business is out of the game and the term "Black Friday" takes on an entirely new meaning. Revenue on Thanksgiving weekend is largely driven by time-sensitive discounts, so shoppers will buy from competitors if a website or point-of-sale (POS) system is down. For those of you running these systems, my heart goes out to you. I have been in similar situations myself many times.
Thanksgiving Weekend Outages Mostly Due to Heavy Traffic
There were a number of reports of ecommerce sites becoming unavailable on Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. Victoria's Secret went beyond secret and became downright invisible three separate times, for a total of about 80 minutes [source]. I have read about downtime and poor site performance at many other online retailers as well, including PC Mall and Crutchfield [source]. Universally, there is no mention of the cause of all this downtime, but the implication is that it was simple old-fashioned traffic overload.
Fire Suppression System Suppresses Sales on eBay
One outage not caused by traffic was ProStores, an online store solution used by lots of smaller operations to run their eBay storefronts. According to a Thanksgiving Day post by ProStores on their discussion board, "the data center fire suppression system tripped the Emergency Power Off (EPO) system causing a loss of power to the data center's raised floor environment" [source]. As is usual in such circumstances, it took most of the day before things could be brought back to normal. I strongly suggest you read their post, as it is an excellent account of the gyrations an IT department has to go through in such situations. I applaud ProStores for being so forthright and providing this information.
Preventing this and Other Outages
Always Available technology from ZeroNines could have prevented the ProStores outage entirely. Yes, that faulty fire suppression system would still have freaked out at that particular data center. But Always Available would have been running one, two, or more instances of the same applications and transactions in the cloud or at other data centers. ProStores clients and their customers would never have known there was a power outage and no sales would have been lost.
ProStores made no mention at all of failover, so I assume they do not have a failover-based recovery system in place. With ZeroNines, that's perfectly fine because we do not use failover either. We make failover unnecessary. We offer disaster avoidance, not disaster recovery. There is no way to prevent all system malfunctions because there are too many complex parts. Next month maybe a circuit breaker will fail. After that, maybe it's a failed hard disk and an application crash. The list goes on.
Girding Your Loins for Next Year
Online retailers wanting to guard themselves against a Black Friday blackout (or on any other day) should consider the modular approach ZeroNines takes. You can apply Always Available to selected high-value systems such as:
- Webstore servers and databases
- Product/inventory databases
- Payment systems
- Image rendering systems
To prevent traffic-related outages, set up proper load balancing. If huge players like J.C. Penney, Apple, Macy's, Sears, Amazon, and Dell can come through Cyber Monday with flying colors [source], you can too. But for the hardware failures, human mistakes, software crashes, and other things that can hit you any day of the year as well, look into ZeroNines.
Visit the ZeroNines website to find out more about how our disaster-proof architecture protects businesses of any description from downtime.
Alan Gin – Founder & CEO, ZeroNines
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