
Why It’s OK To Say No to Backup Appliances
According to IDC’s latest report storage capacity shipped grew 21.5 percent, while total disk storage sales fell 5 percent. Makes sense. Volumes of data continue to explode. And you have to backup that data to ensure you can quickly restore it, if needed. But budget is tight. So what are the options? Many IT professionals are […]

The Inevitable Cloud Outage: 5 Key Essentials to Safe Guard Your Application
A while back, I was starting up an EC2 instance on the AWS cloud when it entered an endless restart loop. All the application deployment efforts we’d made (installation and service configuration) over two weeks just went down the drain. So we called support. The support rep redirected us to his team leader who simply […]

Disaster Recovery for Amazon EC2 in a Single Click
In my journey through the cloud I often come across great new initiatives. The interesting fact is that although the cloud is a pure revolution terms such as SLA, TCO and ROI remain valid, new methodologies and techniques are presented to support them in the cloud. I recently met Uri Wolloch, the founder of N2W […]

Amazon Outage: Is it a Story of a Conspiracy? – Chapter 2
In April 2011, when Amazon’s cloud s east region failed. I posted the first chapter of the Amazon Cloud Outage Conspiracy – it was already very clear that the cloud will fail again and here it is… Chapter 2 Let’s first try to understand Amazon’s explanation for this outage. At approximately 8:44PM PDT, there was […]

VirtualSharp on Cloud Disaster Recovery
I’m sitting here at the CloudBeat event, a conference that I’ve had a deep involvement in with as co-content adviser along with my friend and colleague Paul Miller. Our focus for this event was to avoid the obvious vendor pitches and CloudWashing sessions and instead gather togteher some great customer success stories to tell the […]

Cloud Outages: Design For Failure Or Enterprise Clouds?
Last weekend saw Lightning taking out datacenters associated with Amazon Cloud and Microsoft BPOS. It affected one Availability Zone (AZ) in AWS Europe. Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge has detailed information on the incident. Amazon said that lightning struck a transformer near its data center, causing an explosion and fire that knocked out utility […]

Some Lessons From AWS Outage
Yesterday’s AWS outage has been buzzing around the tech blogosphere even after 24+ hours. As usual naysayers of cloud are up in the arms trying not to miss the golden opportunity to create FUD and competitors to Amazon are tapping into their misery to push their services. Well, people are tuned to accept this as […]

The Appliance of Backup Science
With apologies to Zanussi for the corny title, I had an interesting conversation with Axcient CEO Justin Moore and HP’s VP for Channel Strategy & SMB Meaghan Kelly about the issues of helping small and medium businesses cope with backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity. Yesterday’s conversation was taking place in the context of today’s […]

Zetta Wants You To Forget Using Traditional Backup Solutions
Zetta, the two year old company offering storage as a service targeted towards enterprises, yesterday announced the availability of Zetta Data Protection Solution and they are demoing their offering at the VMworld booth at San Francisco this week. In this era of big data, even enterprises have tons and tons of data which becomes too […]

Microsoft Danger Sidekick Data Loss Sabotage
Words most CIO’s do not ever want to see the same sentence; Microsoft Danger Sidekick Data Loss Sabotage highlights some interesting aspects of companies, data loss, and the willingness of speculation as to the actual reason why something happened. In this case the ongoing issues with the Danger Data Center and how it has impacted […]

Big Gamble, Big Loss: the Fisher Plaza Datacenter Fire
Image via Wikipedia Disaster recovery, it is one of those IT 101 issues, there is no viable good reason to not have a hot/cold spare site in the day and age of cloud computing, data centers stitched across the planet, and while it is not trivial, the ability to synch all those systems into a […]