BlackBerry = Single Point of Failure?

      by Wyatt Walter

RIM/BlackBerry is starting to make me angry. We’re now in the midst of the second multi-hour outage in a week. Last week we lost (BIS) email in North America. In fact, it was for most of the morning and spilled into the afternoon in my timezone. Today, apparently mail hasn’t been delivered for some time and I only noticed when my email seemed suspiciously quiet. This time, however, it’s everything. Phone calls and text messages seem to go in and out with no problem, but anything using the BlackBerry data services seem to be hosed.

Now, I understand that large systems like the BlackBerry Internet and Enterprise Services are complicated and eventually go down. Really, I do get it. What goes up must come down. However, the whole thing is starting to get frustrating to me and I’m ready to give up.

First, there’s a right way and a wrong way to deal with outages. For me, a majority of the frustration could be alleviated with a simple notification or a way to know that something is up. During these outages, there was nothing on BlackBerry or my wireless carrier’s websites, no automated text messages, no nothing. I simply had to realize that email was quieter than normal and check out crackberry.com (an unofficial, yet useful site). Not exactly confidence-instilling. After the incident we got a bit of a “my bad” (I still have yet to find the official statement) from RIM, but just crickets to the public during the outage. At least when Gmail had a system-wide outage earlier this year they were up-front about the issues.

Second, the outages happened all over North America. Yes, multiple several-hour-long outages affecting an entire continent within a week. The sad part is, we come to expect it. Something needs to be done. I can understand that with an IT system this large there will likely always be issues, but something needs to be done to segment pieces from one another. A single issue may cause a system-wide outage occasionally, but not three times in two months is unacceptable.

These outages, of course, come along with having a centralized message delivery system like the BIS/BES. I’m ready to give up and now am on the brink of going on the market for a non-BlackBerry smartphone that will connect directly to my mail servers (the others are mocking us..). It’s a sad day that it’s come to this. I really do have quite a love-hate relationship with my BlackBerry (Tour). It’s a solid phone, a great interface, and great management features. I just can’t constantly think of it as a single point of failure that I have no way of knowing whether or not it works except by sending stupid test emails.

Tags:
Filed under News : Comments (2) : Dec 23rd, 2009

2 Responses to “BlackBerry = Single Point of Failure?”

  1. mobile Says:
    December 23rd, 2009 at 2:38 pm

    Nokia 900 with Exchange or Zimbra? ;)

  2. Wyatt Walter Says:
    December 23rd, 2009 at 4:18 pm

    Yeah.. I definitely was shopping last night for an Android phone :)

    Problem is, these phones are more money than I’m willing to spend when I’ve already got the BlackBerry but then get crappy service.

    Do you use a Nokia with Zimbra? How is it?

Leave a Reply