Samsung Partners Concerned About Mobile Network Knockout

Solution providers are looking for answers on what steps the company is taking after an Easter morning fire at a Samsung datacenter in Gwacheon, South Korea rendered Samsung smartphones and tablets unusable for several hours.

"To see it get to the extent that it got is troublesome. Obviously they have many services located in one data center," said Glenn Pepo, President and CEO of 2k Networks Inc., a Samsung solution provider based in Lemoyne, Penn. "I was pleased to see that service came back online quickly. It appears they did have a plan in place to recover and get back online. There was a service interruption that was minimal. However, there was not an automatic fail-over to another site."

/**/ /**//**/ brightcove.createExperiences(); /**/

Samsung, ranked No. 14 on the 2013 Fortune 500 list at $178.6 billion, did not respond to a request for comment.

"Companies are reluctant to speak on instances such as these," said Ira Grossman, CTO of end user and mobile computing for MCPc, a nationwide partner specializing in mobile solutions with its Anyplace Workspace. "Outages like these should cause enterprises to call into question what mission critical services they outsource to the cloud."

The fourth floor fire of the Samsung building caused issues with credit card services, Samsung's Smart TV with SmartHub, Samsung phones, Samsung tablets and any other Samsung device that uses Samsung servers.

Samsung acknowledged and apologized for the the issues in a Korean blog post on their website and added that the cause of the fire under investigation. No casualties were reported from the blaze.

Due to the timing of the fire occurring overnight, Pepo said that he did not receive any calls or complaints from his customers, but added, "we could have seen widespread service issues had this happened during peak business hours."

Pepo was thankful for the issue not having an affect on his customers, but expressed his concern over the technical issues.

"This is not going to change how we deal with Samsung," he said. "We will speak to them about one data center issue and not having a redundant site incase of an outage like this."