EBlog

Can you guarantee that? To be honest, no.

November 13, 2007 | Posted by: Nicholas

As Chief Geek at Erickson Barnett, I get asked whether I can guarantee the stability/security/reliability/etc. of various technologies quite often. I have come up with a good way to dance around these sorts of questions, because the honest answer is that I just can't 100% guarantee almost anything when it comes to technology on the internet. And now, here's my new example.

Rackspace, a very large, high-end hosting provider, had to deal with a power outage last Sunday. Their contingency plans worked to perfection and all of their servers stayed online with only intermittent service interuptions. That is, until a truck plowed into a nearby power transformer, causing it to explode. Even then, their backup systems came online, but to allow rescue workers safe access to the accident victims the utility company came along and shut down the main power to their facility. Along the way, some ­big sites went offline for a stretch. Talk about a bad day at the office.

Rackspace posted a couple very frank announcements to their site about what was going on, and the CEO quickly fired an email off to their customers, which contains my new mantra and the perfect response to "Can you guarantee that?" sort of questions:

"We cannot promise that hardware won't break, that software won't fail or that we will always be perfect. What we can promise is that if something goes wrong we will rise to the occasion, take action, resolve the issue and accept responsibility."