gary’s web sofa

Consumer online backup provider The Linkup, formerly known as MediaMax, formerly known as StreamLoad just shut up shop and are telling people to go to box.net instead. Streamload split in half last year, spinning off a business orientated cloud storage platform called Nirvanix. I think the plan was for Streamload users to transition to the MediaMax software, and MediaMax would use the Nirvanix storage cloud as it’s back end. Well it looks like someone in MediaMax messed up in a big way. They started deleting data from the old storage infrastructure before verifying that it had made it’s way up to the cloud. They’ve lost anything up to 45% of their customer’s data. There seems to be a bit of a blame game going on, with Nirvanix and The Linkup blaming each other, but that doesn’t help those who paid for a service that they didn’t get.

Clouds are cool ‘n all, but what ever happened to K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid!). Simple architectures go wrong in simple ways which are easy to understand and quick to fix. The team in MediaMax obviously didn’t fully understand what they needed to do to safely move all their customer’s data over, and everyone is out of a job as a result.

By gary | 11. Aug 2008 | Internet, Software, Storage, Technology | 1 Comment »