By John Oates, 26 January 2001 18:00
NEWS Egg issued an apology on Friday afternoon, and has also said it will contact customers individually. silicon.com was tipped off about the issue by an angry customer on Monday. Since then the secure section of Egg's site has been mostly unavailable. Ian Meakin, product marketing manager at Sun, said the company was working closely with Egg on the problems, but refused to comment further. Sun celebrated the tie-up with Egg when it won the contract. According to a case study on Sun's site, published in March 2000, two Sun Enterprise 10000 (Starfire) servers sit at the heart of the bank's infrastructure. Two Sun Enterprise 4000 servers actually host the site, and provide separation from the web to Egg's core processing systems. Pete Marsden, Egg's IT director at the time, is quoted as saying: "We started off with a Microsoft-centric architecture, but that was when we still thought that the internet and the use of ecommerce would happen quickly - but not quite as quickly as it did happen! We have now migrated to the Sun architecture, with Netscape's application, Sun Enterprise Servers, and an Oracle client database. "The reasons for our choice of Sun were very simple. We have aggressive aspirations for rapid growth, and the architecture has to cater for high volumes of customers and transactions in a very short space of time, for which we need the most scalable and robust platform available." Commenting on the broader implications of Egg's problems, Alan Stevens, head of digital services at the Consumers' Association, said: "Online banks really don't have their houses in order. People remain worried about security and this kind of thing really doesn't help." A spokesman for the Financial Services Authority said: "Banks must have systems in place that allow customers to have access to their money." Business Continuity Awareness Week is now over. If you have any information on what could have caused this downtime, email us at editorial@silicon.com.
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