Vendors Take Blame For Most Data Center Incidents 57
dcblogs writes "External forces who work on the customer's data center or supply equipment to it, including manufacturers, vendors, factory representatives, installers, integrators, and other third parties were responsible for 50% to 60% of abnormal incidents reported in a data center, according to Uptime Institute, which has been collecting data since 1994. Over the last three years, Uptime found that 34% of the abnormal incidents in 2009 were attributed to operations staff, followed by 41% in 2010, and 40% last year. Some 5% to 8% of the incidents each year were tied to things like sabotage, outside fires, other tenants in a shared facility. But when an abnormal incident leads to a major outage that causes a data center failure, internal staff gets the majority of blame. 'It's the design, manufacturing, installation processes that leave banana peels behind and the operators who slip and fall on them,' said Hank Seader, managing principal research and education at Uptime."
Re:Internal staff IS to blame (Score:5, Informative)
Nice try -
The reality is that whenever something goes wrong, the vendors/contractors are almost always blamed regardless of who is at fault. It's standard business practice for the customer to bring in a vendor for just this reason - if something goes wrong, they can point at the vendor. The bigger the vendor name the better this works. If you can bring the manufacture(s) in that's best of all. Who can blame you then?
The 'abnormal' incidents where an internal employee is blamed are probably instances where there was absolutely no way for that employee to escape responsibility (ie the syslog entry shows that user logged in, using a one time password token in his possession so that there's no chance of "the vendor has my username and password bullshit", and entering the command 'reboot').
I'm not saying that vendors, contractors and manufacturers don't make mistakes - they're human and from the manufacturer standpoint there are always bugs that are going to cause problems. I'm just saying that the employee / external aspect should be taken into account and thus these statistics taken with a very large grain of salt.