Offsite Backup Apology

Dear Partners,

I wanted to address an issue with our offsite backups that started last week with the rollout of new storage arrays used for Own Web Now offsite backups. As you already know, we take great pride in providing rock solid solutions that scale worldwide. We put in countless hours in design, testing, analysis and performance tuning on all services and you can expect the OWN services to be rock solid. That in fact is what you and your customers pay for.

Last week one of the new storage arrays we have added to the mix started to cause issues with the server code that actually maps the logical partitions and makes them available for access and replication to our backbone, offsite centers and your clients. Offsite backups are a partner service only, we do not offer it in direct retail. You pay what it costs us to provide the same redundant layer of data protection we expect and maintain for ourselves. I know that if I lose a backup, your customer will be out of business, you and I will be in the court. That is why I insist on the highest grade quality when it comes to protecting data. That is also why we give it away to our partners at cost – I want you to be the hero for that business that just lost everything and made it back thanks to you.

So when that promise is not delivered on, believe me, I am the most disappointed one. For close to our week a small portion of our clients had to put up with unreliable backups, with backup jobs not completing. Even though you are paying at cost and there is no SLA to speak of at all, I want you to be aware of how dedicated we are to our partnership. We will waive all the June monthly fees as a result of the issues some of you faced. Thats right, even if you were not impacted you will be getting a free month. We understand the enormity of what you put in our hands, we want you to know that you have a partner with a global presence by your side, one that stands by their products. This not only applies to offsite backups but everything we do.

So in closing, thank you for your business and the faith you put in Own Web Now Corp. I am sorry that we have disappointed some of you and in sign of good faith we will eat the fees associated with the offsite backups through the month of June. Our offsite backups have been rock solid since we started them, we aim to keep that level of reliability.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Vlad Mazek, MCSE

Note: What actually happened? We use eSATA II chasis rack raid systems for backups. These systems are further replicated off to Chicago via private Gigabit network. We use Samba (SMB/CIFS) software on both the appliance and on the remote network to create replication partners. Due to the incompatibilities between the driver and Samba 3.0.10–1.4E 12.2 software our replication systems created enormous amount of traffic and requests of the NAS systems. As a result, the load on the systems spiked, made those partitions unavailable and as a result made reporting and access difficult for some customers (roughly 300 were affected). I would like to thank our partners at EMC and AhSay for their assistance with troubleshooting of the issue and my staff for putting in very long hours over the Memorial Day weeekend to get to the bottom of it.