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Editors note: The Skinny blog is written by WRAL TechWire editor and cofounder Rick Smith.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK Its difficult to tune in a golf event or even some entertainment programs and NOT see ads from IBM touting its cloud computing efforts. But behind the video glitz there are problems that tech companies strive to avoid: Outages.

A rash of outages have hit IBMs Cloud in recent months, raising some concerns about whats happening as IBM prepares to split the company with its could focuse built around Raleigh-based Red Hat and the $34 billion acquisition of the Hatters two years ago to go all-in on cloud.

With IBM betting the business on hybrid cloud, the constant issues with its own cloud can hardly be helping its sales team to convince customers that Big Blue has what it takes to help their businesses advance, warns tech news site The Register.

No cloud is perfect, The Register notes. Yet

Rick Smith, WRAL TechWires editor and a cofounder, writes The Skinny.

All clouds have outages, the news site which follows IBM very closely says. Google had a biggie last weekend when itreportedmultiple Google Cloud Products experienced elevated latencies and/or errors due to an issue with Access Control Lists (ACLs) intermittently for a duration of 10 hours and 42 minutes.

But IBM has now had ten significant issues since April 3, by our count.

That number certainly raised the eyebrows of one broadband expert who talked with WRAL TechWire on the basis that he not be identified.

The recent IBM outages, especially their frequency, would be a cause for concern, he said.

To be honest, he added: IBM Cloud is relatively small compared with AWS [Amazon Web Services] and [Microsoft[ Azure.

Figuring out how any cloud provider is doing is not easy, he adds.

Its difficult to assess the performance of the big public cloud providers. They dont publish numbers for one thing. Another is that outages are usually not an all or nothing situation. Their services are so complex that portionsmay be unavailable for a time. Its also possible for users to contract for specific types of services that dont take advantage of redundancy built-in to the infrastructure and to take charge of their own reliability. AWS and others do quote reliability stats for their base services that are very impressive but impossible to verify.

The Register has tracked IBM, though, noting that a 71 issue (the rank it uses for incidents that see business-critical systems become unavailable has occurred on:

Users may experience connectivity issues when trying to access the listed cloud services IBM warned about a May 25 incident that struck Washington DC, Osaka, London, Dallas, Sydney, Tokyo, and Frankfurt.

The list of affected services is interesting since it lcudes IBM Watson artificial intelligence which is the other big piece of the new IBM once the spinoff of its services group is complete.

Heres the list from The Register:

So is this a big problem for IBM?

I have not heard any buzz in the research and education community. Again, this is probably a reflection of their size (or lack thereof), the expert said.

IBM touts their hybrid cloud platform that has components in IBM datacentersand on customer premises. Its impossible to gauge the impact of their cloud incidents on customer operations. Its probably zero for some customers and could be severe for others.

One things for sure: IBM sales reps are being quizzed about whats happening.

See original here:
Recent outages could be taking some of the shine off IBM's cloud offensive - WRAL Tech Wire