by Dave Zornow
This is probably a great day to buy stock in Carbonite, Mozy, IronMountain or anyone of dozens of online backup providers. Yesterday’s news from Nielsen has got to make even the best prepared IT managers twitch. And for those who don’t have a backup solution in place, downright apopletic.
We apologize for the delay in releasing data yesterday, Tuesday, November 17, 2009. Yesterday’s power outage at the Nielsen Oldsmar data center facility was due to a problem at a substation transformer that impacted the local area. This resulted in a substation failure which caused a power surge large enough to damage our uninterrupted power supply. We were able to bring up our diesel generators within seconds but had to restart and test all equipment in the data center. This took us the better part of the day. We were able to retrieve and validate all data. Nielsen Answers and all products and systems are back on line and accessible for all users.
The St. Petersburg Times quotes a Nielsen spokesman saying, “We have backup plans for hurricanes, and we do test for the possibility that the building will be struck by lightning. This was an unforeseeable, unprecedented event.”
Nielsen now knows what we the little people already knew. Although you can insure against data loss, insuring against lost time is quite another thing.
To their credit, Nielsen over the years has done an amazing job of recovering from hurricanes, server crashes and various other human errors and acts of god. Of course, that doesn’t mean their clients are always so grateful for their efforts.
There’s always a lighter side to data disaster — usually provided by those who don’t have to clean up the mess or suffer the consequences. Last May, when Nielsen didn’t deliver ratings for almost a week because of a server crash, TVByTheNumbers blogger Bill Gorman provided this explanation:
Summary for the rational: Nielsen has a very complicated system. Mistakes were made. Sorry. We’re doing our best to correct them and make sure they don’t happen again.
Summary for the crazy: Nielsen’s process was built to undercount the ratings of your favorite shows while overcounting those of the shows you hate. Problem is, managing a conspiracy of that complexity is not an easy thing. This week our nefarious scheming was almost exposed. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
The media business feigns paralysis everytime Nielsen drops a bit. Which is ironic for an industry whose consistent answer to why numbers don’t match is always “rounding.”
Sources: St. Petersburg Times, MediaNewsAndViews:”The Week The Ratings Died, TVByTheNumbers