Disaster recovery experts dig down into Azure cloud outages over past 12 months

(c)iStock.com/JasonDoiy

The majority of Microsoft’s service errors in the first quarter of 2014 were advisory, while there were significantly more service interruptions in the following three quarters, according to analysis carried out by CloudEndure.

The figures, taken from Azure’s Service Health Dashboard across last year, saw three full service interruptions in Q1, a whopping 28 in Q2, 16 in Q3 and zero in the final quarter. The highest number of errors came in Q1 (259), yet also produced the lowest number of partial service interruptions (88), compared to 134, 129 and 127 for the other three quarters.

The analysis came about after Azure suffered two debilitating outages last year; one in August, and one in November, which was caused by storage blob front ends going into an infinite loop – a process which went undetected during testing.

Picture credit: CloudEndure

John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research, told CloudTech the outage was “really not good”, and Microsoft’s response was “an awful lot less than stellar.” This came after research which found Microsoft had taken the clear second place – behind AWS, naturally – in the global cloud infrastructure market.

Not surprisingly, Americas West had the most outages overall (114), followed by Americas East (98) and Europe West (91), although Europe West and Americas North Central had the most full service interruptions (5). By service, compute had by far the most errors (135), followed by SQL databases (124), virtual machines (64), websites (61) and storage (55).

Despite these figures, CloudEndure is quick to point out that statistics should be taken with a pinch of salt. “Planning the location of your app based on the historical number of errors and performance issues is probably not the best approach”, a blog post reads. “While cloud provider issues are important, you should keep in mind that the top reason for application downtime remains human error.”

It’s certainly the reason Joyent’s servers unexpectedly went down back in May – and it’s good advice to follow here.

Announcing @Solgenia_Corp to Exhibit at @CloudExpo New York & Silicon Valley [#Cloud]

SYS-CON Events announced today that Solgenia will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Solgenia is the global market leader in Cloud Collaboration and Cloud Infrastructure software solutions. Designed to “Bridge the Gap” between Personal and Professional Social, Mobile and Cloud user experiences, our solutions help large and medium-sized organizations dramatically improve productivity, reduce collaboration costs, and increase the overall enterprise value by bringing collaboration and infrastructure solutions to the Cloud. Based on innovative patented technologies that support Private, Public and Hybrid Cloud models, all our products offer ease of use, platform neutrality and mobile ubiquity. Solgenia products and solutions are used by 3500 plus companies worldwide.

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Tech News Recap for the Week of 1/12/2015

Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick tech news recap of articles you may have missed from the week of 1/12/2015.

Tech News Recap

Tech News RecapVerizon’s cloud came back 40 hours after a scheduled outage. The number of attacks against the travel industry continues to grow; this time it was United Airlines MileagePlus accounts. CENTCOM’s twitter account was also hacked. 80% of online adults are now on a smartphone, however less than 10% use wearables. There were also some good articles around cloud spending, big data, business continuity and some predictions for what’s in store around end user computing, security and cloud as we head into 2015.

{8-Point Checklist to a Successful Data Center Move from CTO Chris Ward}

 

By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist

 

Announcing @TufinTech to Exhibit at @CloudExpo New York [#Cloud]

SYS-CON Events announced today that Tufin, the market-leading provider of Security Policy Orchestration Solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
As the market leader of Security Policy Orchestration, Tufin automates and accelerates network configuration changes while maintaining security and compliance. Tufin’s award-winning Orchestration Suite™ gives IT organizations the power and agility to enforce security policy across complex, multi-vendor enterprise networks. With more than 1,400 customers worldwide, Tufin enables IT to positively impact the entire business by reducing the time and cost to implement network changes by up to 80 percent.

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18 Steps for Successful Software Deployment By @Stackify | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]

It is important that operations be in the loop when it comes to planning any software deployment. They need to know when the project starts, not at the last minute about your new deployment. Ensure that operations is aware of any infrastructure changes needed well in advance. If the operations team is your front-line defense for monitoring and troubleshooting your app, help them help you by collaborating on how best to monitor the app and discuss early warning signs of trouble to be alerted to. If you’re thinking of setting up DevOp team you should probably read this

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The Sales Process with @InMindComputing | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]

In this demo at 15th Cloud Expo, Mirko Fellner, Senior Vice President and Head of Marketing & Sales at In Mind Computing, shows the Insight Selling Suite, a cloud-based solution that makes the sales process better and more reasonable. It runs in the SAP HANA Cloud, so it brings the best of both worlds together – Cloud and Big Data. Get all these questions and hundreds more like them answered at the 2015 Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, and November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California.

Our upcoming June 9-11, 2015, event in New York City will present a total of 10 simultaneous tracks (the largest conference content in the world) by an all-star faculty, over three days, plus the popular two-day «Cloud Computing Bootcamp» presented by Janakiram MSV, an analyst with the Gigaom Research analyst network where he covers the Cloud Services landscape.

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Dynamite Plots and Logs By @AndrewFBurton | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]

Log data provides the most granular view into what is happening across your systems, applications, and end users. Logs can show you where the issues are in real-time, andprovide a historical trending view over time. Logs give you the whole picture.
Yesterday we announced a new Community Pack for our friends at Fastly. I’m a big fan of Fastly. Not only do they have a compelling mission of changing the way people experience the Internet, but I like their simple assertion that slow is unacceptable.

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Dell Foglight ‘Most Popular APM Tools’ | @DevOpsSummit [#APM #DevOps]

Dell Foglight has been named to IT Central Station’s ‘Top 10 Most Popular APM – 2015 Edition.’ IT Central Station is a dynamic community site with reviews, recommendations, and other expert advice for technology buyers.
Foglight, Dell’s application performance monitoring (APM) solution, blends business context with deep technical insight, unifying all users and data within a structured model built around transactions – leveraging patent-pending TransactionDNA technology.

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Full Disk Encryption Is Physical Security By @Vormetric | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]

How much risk do you have of someone stealing disks from your datacenter? Take the average life span of a hard drive. The enterprise class hard drive is designed to last a minimum of 5 years. During that 5 years a SAN or NAS filled with hard disks is expected to have at least 99.999 percent uptime or better. So if you take the same approach to securing data in your datacenter as you did with your laptop, what risk have you really mitigated? None. 99.999% of the time, as that disk is up and running in the datacenter you have provided ZERO additional protection for your data. Just because it says encryption on the label does not mean security.

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The New @XebiaLabs Development Dashboard @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]

The Development Dashboard shows the planned major releases and maintenance releases of our products and plugins. You can use the dashboard to search for the estimated release date and version of a particular issue (such as an issue created as the result of a Feature Request), or simply to see what’s coming up. We’re excited to announce the launch of our improved documentation site at docs.xebialabs.com. We reorganized the documentation to make searching and browsing easier, and we’ve given the site a new look and feel. Our newly organized website has several new features we are proud of, the biggest one being our new Development Dashboard.

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