Network Problem in Amsterdam Causes Phoenix NAP Outage

Brought to you by The WHIR.

UPDATE 2:45 pm ET: This story has been updated to include an interview with William Bell, Phoenix NAP VP of product development for cloud and enterprise services, and more detail about the cause of the outage.

WHIR_logo_100

Phoenix NAP customers in its Amsterdam public cloud location experienced intermittent storage connectivity on Tuesday related to a network issue.

William Bell, Phoenix NAP VP of product development for cloud and enterprise services, says customers in the Amsterdam location saw intermittent latency spikes and connectivity.

“Our engineering team has involved in the hardware vendor in order to help diagnose and troubleshoot the root cause of this outage in order to find a quick resolution that should restore services to your VM’s,” Phoenix NAP support staff said in an update on Sept. 11.

Phoenix NAP apologized for the “extended interruption in service” in a post on its “Current Status” page, a central portal updated frequently by Phoenix NAP to provide detail on issues that may impact customers.

“It’s important that a customer can get a quick view of exactly what is going on in as real-time as possible,” Bell says. “The only thing that it causes occasionally is misinformation. The initial customer reports we got made it look like a storage issue, and with some issues that we’ve had with NetApp in the past we definitely zeroed in there first, so once we were able to run through our checklist and look through all the different components that we’ve been working hard to identify. We were able to narrow it down to the networking side, find the optic and replace it and get our customers back up and running.”

“NetApp has been a good partner to us and they have definitely been working really hard to make sure we have high uptime for our customers,” Bell says.

Phoenix NAP’s Amsterdam cloud hosting node was opened in March 2012 in an Interxion data center, marking its first expansion overseas. Amsterdam is a popular location for US-based web hosts to expand in Europe. In June, SingleHop opened its new data center in Amsterdam, expanding its server capacity by 20 percent.

Phoenix NAP opened its second North American node for its cloud services at a Latisys data center in Ashburn, Virginia. The company has third location in Phoenix, Arizona, where it is headquartered.

Recent research has predicted worldwide spending on public IT cloud services to reach $47.4 billion in 2013, with enterprise cloud projects exploding over the next two years.

This article was originally published at "Phoenix NAP Replaces Bad Optic Behind Storage Interruption."