After a massive blowout yesterday, big Indonesian sites such as Detik, Okezone and thousands of other websites went down after a fire burst from one of the UPS device at Indonesia’s Internet Data Center in Jakarta (IDC 3D).
Also the home for Open IXP (Open Internet Exchane Point), IDC 3D took down major Indonesian servers as well as the whole internet connection for some ISPs. Open IXP was set up as an alternative for IIX (Indonesia Internet Exchange) hosted at Cyber Building. Both centres handle the country’s Internet traffic routing in addition to hosting a great number of Indonesian sites. Because of the fire and the emergency procedures, any connection to Open IXP was cut off from 8 o’clock on Sunday evening, which means many sites may have become inaccessible.
Dondy Bappedyanto, an IT businessman familiar with data centers couldn’t emphasise more on the basic principle of web hosting and data centre : “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”. This message is echoed by Michael Smith Jr, a former Yahoo said via his Twitter account. “101 was totally forgotten. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Pretty simple stuff”.
Bappedyanto explains how most ISPs and web hosting companies puts their data center and other core infrastructure in one location in order to push costs down. This is not a good thing for the business, although similar incidents have occurred in the past these companies don’t learn.
After this incident, there are a few after-shock discussions on the internet about cloud hosting, where “cloud-lovers” went out and said “I told you so”. Somewhat unrelated, this shocking event showed to Indonesian companies what would happen (again) when they forgot to distribute the eggs to different baskets. Some people also looking at cloud computing services as a solution for this kind of issue.
Of course some cloud service companies managed to escape this fire-incident by putting their servers in different locations, although we heard a few cloud companies also suffered from the outage. And now running with its hair on fire, CTOs are now looking at cloud computing providers to solve this problem for them. “Cloud services is growing in Indonesia and in the world, and I believe this trend will be there” said Adi Kusma from Biznet, an ISP and cloud computing provider, one of the providers that didn’t get affected by the outage.
“the terms ‘cloud computing’ is fairly new for Indonesian businesses, it all depends on how businesses can choose the right provider”, Bappedyanto said to us regarding cloud computing services. His company, Infinys is one of the country’s cloud service provider not affected by the outage although some people have difficulties accessing Open IXP due to the IDC 3D failure.
IDC was build 10 years ago based on the increasing demand for local content generated by the community. Its mission and vision is clearly stated by its slogan: Indonesia’s largest carrier neutral data center. Currently IDC has data centers in 5 cities in Indonesia, two of them are in Jakarta, Batam, Makassar, Bandung and Surabaya. IDC was also once dubbed as The World’s Coolest Data Center by Mike Walsh.
