Fujitsu Outage Highlights Critical Network Flaw for WA Health

On the 2nd of February Fujitsu’s Malaga WA Data Centre suffered two network interruption incidents, one of which saw the entire data centre shut down for up to 12 hours, as reported in IT News.

Major clients such as Western Australia’s Health Department and Bankwest were affected. Reports emerged that Bankwest’s ATM network, Online and Phone Banking as well as all EFTPOS services were offline for half a day.

The incident highlights a very common and flawed assumption in network design.

You put a large amount of effort into building resiliency and redundancy into your server structure, but place all your data and often the operational heart of your business in one building because it has multiple levels of redundancy built into it. But this incident shows that even the best in the business (and we host some services with Fujitsu, so this is not a comment on their skills) cannot guarantee perpetual uptime.

The takeaway lesson is this: your network planning process needs to consider not just the server structure and the power redundancy options of your data centre, but also its location and what you would do if those systems failed as well?

In our experience, more failures occur with the sites that data is housed at than with the hardware and software processing your data.

The key question is: how many data centres can your cloud provider serve your data from AND have you built that level of redundancy into your network design?

James Walker.