NOC-NOC, who's there? Or, "I've seen the thumbwheel and the damage done"

NOC= (Blackberry-maker Research In Motion's Network Operations Center in Waterloo, Ont.)

As to the latter portion of this post's title, NOT an original.

Readers of a certain vintage may recognize that saying as an adaptation from an old Neil Young song entitled "I've Seen The Needle and the Damage Done."

My colleague Tom Krazit gives the phrase a fresh meaning as he puts up a post containing observations about BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion's Tuesday service outage, as well as continued practice of running pretty much all BlackBerry email and data traffic through its Network Operations Center.

Tom writes in part:

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that expansion efforts at RIM's NOC may have been to blame for the outage. The problem isn't that the servers are in Canada; they could be anywhere. It's just that everything has to go through the one location. In theory, as long as you have enough redundant backup systems and plans, that shouldn't be a problem. But every now and then, it is.

Frank Gilman, the chief technology officer for Los Angeles law firm Allen Matkins, was forced to deal with the outage Monday afternoon. "What surprised me was the apparent lack of a solid business continuity plan on RIM's part to ensure reasonable connectivity," he said via e-mail, of course. "A company that is marketing devices that increase the mobility of professionals should have systems and contingencies in effect to avoid an outage of that size and duration."

This can lead to problems.

As Tom points out, and I so totally agree, not having multi-site redundancy for when this sheet hits the fan kind of leaves enterprises who have put full faith in BlackBerry's "five nines" Service Level Agreements in a real pickle.

That's so not OK.

If you are an enterprise BlackBerry user, I'd love to read your thoughts on this. Would you rather that RIM offer more redundancy, including perhaps, addl NOC(s).