Benioff red-faced over Salesforce.com outage

Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff said on Tuesday a recent site outage was an embarrassment for his company but that new technology will soon make its systems more resilient.

The 20 December, 2005, outage cut many companies off from critical data for hours on a busy, pre-holiday business day. It also called into question how well Salesforce, which stores customer and sales records for thousands of businesses, is holding up under rapid growth.

Benioff, who has not commented much about the incident publicly, said in an interview at a San Francisco media event that outages are an inevitable part of computing and that they happen very rarely at Salesforce.

He said: "We don't want outages and we're doing everything we can not to have them but we'll occasionally have them. That's part of computing... nothing runs at 100 per cent availability."

Salesforce claims an availability or "uptime" rate of between 99 per cent and 100 per cent. Yet a handful of customers who complained to silicon.com sister site, CNET News.com, about the 20 December glitch said smaller, less disruptive outages occur more frequently than they anticipated.

To combat such concerns, Salesforce has invested $50m in new computing infrastructure that's designed to stay up and running in the event of a disaster. During a speech on Tuesday, Benioff said the company will complete its conversion to its new systems, which include "immediate failover" capability, next month.

He said: "It's a new level of performance, reliability and scalability for the company. Everything had to be rewritten. It was many, many steps we had to take and a huge amount of work over a year."

In addition to replacing nearly all its hardware and software and building two new data centres, Salesforce is adding database "mirroring" technology that will significantly boost its data redundancy capabilities, Benioff said. The mirroring system creates a duplicate database in a separate location and synchronises the data instantaneously. In the event that one database is destroyed or disabled, the other takes over.

But even mirroring would not have helped Salesforce avoid last month's problem, which was caused by a database software bug, Benioff said.

He said: "This will protect against huge natural disasters; we'll have zero downtime in a natural disaster. But it's not insurance against a bug."

Alorie Gilbert writes for CNET News.com