Verizons Irony: Cloud Downtime Reduces Outage Likelihood
Acknowledging the “strange case of irony,” Verizon on Monday said that 40 hours of downtime for the carrier’s enterprise cloud over the weekend means that almost all future maintenance and upgrades will happen without much, if any, impact on customers.
Verizon Enterprise Solutions upgraded Verizon Cloud, its cloud infrastructure and storage platform, with functionality that will allow system maintenance to happen behind the scenes, not interrupting service or limiting infrastructure capacity.
The downtime, which began at 1 a.m. ET on Saturday morning and wasn’t complete until approximately 5 p.m. on Sunday, drew the ire of some customers online; however, the outage was well publicized in advance. The company was hoping to complete the upgrade in 24 hours, but wound up missing that window by more than a half day.
In addition to seamless upgrades, Verizon updated the user interface on its Cloud Marketplace, launched in November, adding administrative tools that the carrier says will make it easier to review virtual machines, disks and other resources used for a particular project.
“We see Verizon continue to invest in Verizon Cloud,” said William Fellows, co-founder and research vice president, 451 Research. “Infrastructure improvements that have a positive impact on availability and the customer experience position Verizon Cloud well for continued market adoption.”
The enterprise cloud is growing more and more competitive. Verizon has to compete with traditional rivals such as AT&T, while battling the likes of IT powers Microsoft, IBM, HP and others as well.
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