Ok I lied.  I am going to put out another update about the Cisco .com outage that I reported here a few days ago.  I talked to one of my contacts within Cisco Engineering and was told “I can’t disclose alot but it was a power outage.”  My reply to him was that I was shocked that Cisco doesn’t use Akamai or another service or even multiple national and international data centers to serve their content out of.  His only response was that there were systems in place and that the failure was not an infrastructure (data that is) failure but a power failure.

Either way its not good for Cisco.  The company that has been preaching the benefits of hardware heavy, hyper redundant and extensively planned networks clear has come up short in their own network.   Valleywag also picked on on the outage Wed and had this to say.  Cisco also talks about the outage on their blog and gives more detail than I expected them to.  What I would hope to see though is a full review of the incedent and a published Whitepaper on what happened as well as what they plan to do to prevent this in the future.

Some of you may be asking why on earth would they do that?  PR is the first answer.  They owe to themselves and their investors to protect their bottom line.  If they just let this go it will leave doubt in the minds of people like me that like Cisco, but have concerns about where they are going and how stable they are as a long term Enterprise networking company, and trust me there are lots of people like me with those concerns.  The other reason to do it is to protect their customers especially their big customers with similar data centers from having the same problem in the future.  I hope to get more info in the near future.  If I do you can bet I will let you guys in on it.