Bing Travel's Lack of Back-Up Shows Vulnerabilities

Over the weekend, an electrical fire at a Seattle data center shut down several Web sites including Microsoft Corp.’s much-hyped travel search engine, Bing Travel. The fire started Thursday night in Fisher Plaza, an area that houses studios and servers for Web sites and television.  While Bing Travel was offline, Microsoft diverted users to Orbitz, another of its partners, a spokeswoman for Microsoft told reporters. Power was restored on Saturday after a 36-hour outage. The company also released a statement saying that they felt they had the service up as quickly as possible. Bing Travel apparently had no backup servers to rely on.

Any IT guy will tell you this is a very, very bad practice. While one data center is fine for MomandPopsSpecialTonic.com — a single data center for a popular Web site, much less a search engine that is supposed to be going toe-to-toe with Travelocity, Priceline, Yahoo! Travel or whatever — is “getting caught with their pants down,” as one former Amazon.com executive put it.

Jesse Robbins, a former “master of disaster” for Amazon, told Techflash,”You can expect an outage in a data center every couple of years even in the best-engineered facilities.” Robbins said that companies have a responsibility to create disaster recovery plans that work and don’t rely on single data centers.  Those that don’t, ” . . . end up getting caught with their pants down.”

The reason why many companies don’t bother with a second location is low perceived risk and return on investment, said Ashutosh Tiwary, chief executive of Doyenz in Seattle, an online backup recovery company.

Bing Travel wasn’t accessible for 36 hours, more than a day without views or usage. But beyond that, when a Web site goes down because of a data center problem, it signifies not only to users but to the tech community that its owners/developers don’t take the site or its business seriously. The only other option is to think they’re cheap and would rather save a few thousand dollars than have a back-up server in a second location that might spare them ridicule and embarrassment if its sole service location fails.

My only thought after this fiasco was: did Microsoft Corp. know about Bing Travel’s lack of back-up before it partnered with them, or was this weekend a very rude awakening? If Microsoft knew before, someone definitely dropped the ball on this one. In today’s technologically advanced world, no company can afford to have a Web site — a global storefront — shut down because of a local fire.