Bach Seat

It is always smart to have a backup plan. However, the IPO filings for social media giant LinkedIn revealed they do not have a backup plan. Mashable has a nice summary of LinkedIn’s SEC S-1 form. The business networking site does not have a backup plan. announced that it plans to raise at least $175 million in the initial public offering. According to the forms, LinkedIn earned $161.4 million in revenue from January 2010 to September 2010.

The revenue came from three products:

• Job listings – 41%
• Advertising – 32%
• Premium subscriptions 27%.

Real-time backup data center

Data Center Knowledge found in the IPO was that LinkedIn does not have a real-time backup data center. The article says that a failure of the social media firms primary data center would knock its LinkedIn.com site offline.

“We recently implemented a disaster recovery program, which allows us to move production to a backup data center in the event of a catastrophe. Although this program is functional, it does not yet offer a real-time backup data center, so if our primary data center shuts down, there will be a time that the website will remain shut down while the transition to the backup data center takes place” LinkedIn said on page 14 of the SEC filing. The company has key infrastructure located in San Francisco and southern California, which are both prone to earthquakes. “Despite any precautions, we may take, the occurrence of a natural disaster or other unanticipated problems at our hosting facilities could result in lengthy interruptions in our services,” the company said.

The social media site has taken steps to protect its user data. Data Center Knowledge reported that LinkedIn was deploying a business continuity program in an Equinix (EQIX) data center in Chicago. The company said it already housed equipment in Equinix data centers in California. In December 2010, LinkedIn opened a new data center in Los Angeles, saying that the expansion would give “an additional, more robust data center that not only helps us handle the increasing traffic load on our servers, but to also provide more redundancy in case of an emergency.”

Data Center Knowledge summarizes that LinkedIn has its backup data stored in a remote data center using a “cold ” or “warm” backup configuration. These approaches don’t provide an instant rollover in the event of a major downtime event but allow a site owner to redeploy the site from the most recent backup. Servers in the backup data center are typically configured with the required software and applications, so they’re ready to be deployed as needed. LinkedIn didn’t indicate how long it might be offline in the event of a data center failure.

Multiple data centers

The Data Center Knowledge article points out that larger Internet companies like Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo (YHOO), and Facebook have multiple data centers and can use their network to quickly shift workloads between different facilities. LinkedIn’s infrastructure has not yet reached that scale. The article suggests that  LinkedIn has not arranged for a real-time backup set up because of the challenges it presents for database-driven sites.  The article uses Facebook’s experience when the social networker added its first East Coast data center in Virginia. The Facebook engineering team found that setting up a second site serving real-time data created “two main application-level challenges: cache consistency and traffic routing,” according to a blog entry by Facebook’s Jason Sobel.

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I have been on LinkedIn for quite a while and never gave their DRP a second thought. Maybe because I didn’t need the job networking connections until recently. Seems to me that if LinkedIn wants to compete with social media favorite Facebook, and grow the paid portions of the site, they need to have 24x7x365 availability. Hopefully, that is in the development pipeline after they raise their $175 million in the IPO.

Is a real-time backup data center a must have for LinkedIn to continue to grow?

Have you had real success with landing your next gig with LinkedIn? Facebook?

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.