SolsticeTanCo

Our Salon is running Helios Version 12. Last Saturday their system apparently crashed leaving us totally stranded! Did anyone else have problems with this? I've emailed my rep directly and NO RESPONSE. Anyone else having Helios Headaches

debra

Yes we lost sevice most of the day saturday then again yesterday for a couple hours. I called but they dont give any explanation for the disruption. Im looking into a new software. Any suggestions???

BuyersGroup

It comes with offsite services. I uze salontouch after trashing helios a few years ago. Never a peep out of salontouch its extremely stable and far less expensive.

mmurra

Dear Helios Customer,

You may be aware that Helios, LLC suffered a catastrophic network failure on Saturday, November 17, 2012 which impacted users of Helios 12 Enterprise, Helios Desktop users who process credit cards and even users of the New Sunshine Marketing Hub. Although the full investigation into this incident is still in progress, we want to update you on the facts we currently know regarding this incident.

Shortly before 11am EST on Saturday, November 17, the public power utility sent a massive power spike into the data center where Helios, LLC hosts all of its offsite servers. The data center’s emergency power management protocols performed as expected; however, the intensity of the power spike overwhelmed several of the surge protectors which subsequently sacrificed themselves in an attempt to protect the sensitive electronic equipment powered by them. Once these surge protectors were compromised, the power spike was able to continue through the network until it reached and crippled a couple of the actual servers on which the Helios network is dependent.

The Helios network administration team responded quickly to address the issue and was able to remotely reboot the rest of the servers in the network on auxiliary power but the crippled servers had to be removed from the network in order for application services to be restored. This necessitated an onsite visit to the data center and physical troubleshooting of each server to determine which ones were non-functional, then to bypass the affected servers and bring the rest of the network back to an operational state. This stage in the process took several hours during which time the first responders were in regular communication with the call center support team to provide updates but they were also cautious not to provide unrealistic assessments of the time frame until the network would be operational once again.

Helios would like to apologize for the inconvenience this prolonged outage inflicted upon our customers. Helios 12 Enterprise users suffered a complete application outage as did users of the New Sunshine Marketing Hub. Helios 11 and Helios 12 Desktop users who process credit cards through Helios also lost credit card processing functionality during this incident. All of these applications and functionalities have been restored and there was no loss of data resulting from this incident. New Sunshine Marketing Hub users who had emails, text messages or social media updates scheduled to send during the period of the outage can rest assured that these scheduled posts were sent at the earliest opportunity once the application services were restored. Since the Helios Support call center application is also hosted on this network, this limited the call center team’s ability to field the flood of inbound calls resulting from this incident. Additionally, attempts to send out a network wide email explanation would have been unsuccessful since the Marketing Hub application was also affected. The only communication method that was available during the height of the crisis was to post a brief message on Facebook that only reaches a limited number of users who have liked the Helios page. This was not an attempt to keep our users in the dark regarding the nature of the incident but rather simply a reflection on the severity this incident had on the entire Helios, LLC operations.

Once the damaged servers have been replaced and are ready to be re-installed into the network, we will send out another email notifying you of the scheduled outage during an overnight maintenance window. We will also be taking steps to ensure that even in the event of a future incident of this magnitude our call center and email auto-response systems are functional independent of the rest of the core network services. In this way we can assure that our front line support team is not left in the dark and we can provide more timely communication regarding the nature of incidences as well as estimated times for services to be restored.

mmurra

Helios sent the above explanation to us recently.

unity

Helios was and still is a joke.

__________________
OMG! I made a post! :)

BuyersGroup

Server farms are redundant which makes a switch to an offsite mirror takes as short a time as a microsecond. Could a lesser service take an hour... maybe but no credible system will go down for a period of days.

Its possible they experienced a breach and shut down to prevent leakage.