Net Data Design, LLC Blog

We, as an SMB (small and medium business), have been using Amazon’s S3 for sometime now. We are a small software development company that specializes in web applications. We also host web applications and sites. The benefit of S3 is it gives us the ability to keep complete off-site back-ups as well as share certain files with outside contractors and clients.

This probably isn’t anything earth shattering to most, but it certainly beats our old system of taking back-up tapes and DVD off-site every night. That method had too many short-comings to say the least.

Recently, for one of our secure document storage web applications, we started incorporating a data provider that utilizes the S3 API. Setting a search provider for S3 proved to be a bit of a challenge, but so far it has worked out fairly well.

So lets get back to the topic at hand. For the SMB looking for a cost effective way to keep file storage organized and highly available, I’m hard pressed to come up with another viable solution. If you’re the owner of a SMB or work for one, what options have you explored? What method of [off-site] back-up are you using? I’d really like to hear from you…

Image my suprise this morning when I grabbed my Blackberry off the nightstand to find I didn’t have my usually 20-30 emails. Even more startling was there was no emails! Had the world come to an end and I was unaware.

So, it’s down the stairs I go to crank up the laptop and what did I see? You guessed it, emails! It wasn’t the world that came to a stop, it was my Blackberry email service! You never know how dependent you are on something until it’s not available.

While I was still able to make phone calls (the first being to my phone carrier), browse the Internet and send and receive text messages. It was the phone call to my carrier that confirmed my suspicions about the email outage.

Research In Motion’s (RIM) service is normally very reliable, but it centralized approach mean a small issue can affect millions of Blackberry users. Maybe it’s time to rethink the architecture.

For myself the outage appears to lasted about 7 hours, but while I was awake, the 3 hours seemed like a much longer time. So, any other BB dependents go through withdraw? Maybe the nickname Crackberry fits!