Think back to December 31 1999. Where were you when the countdown to the New Year ended?

One thing I can be certain of is that you weren’t stuck in a lift hurtling 12 storeys to the ground, in the midst of a massive traffic pile-up because all the lights stopped working at once or in a plane plummeting 30,000 feet from the sky as all the onboard systems died.

Yet, if the scaremongers in the IT world were to be believed, you should have been. Fears over the effects of the millennium bug had been blasted all over the IT press and even in the mainstream media for months (years in some cases) beforehand.

Millions of pounds were wasted in a desperate bid to upgrade systems before the end of the century. In the end, absolutely nothing happened. The world didn’t end with a bang or …

Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Software – Enterprise Solutions

Informatica, which pioneered the current data integration tooling market, is seeking to reboot growth by targeting midmarket prospects who have traditionally perceived its solutions as too complex and expensive. The technology linchpin of this strategy is “Vibe,” a service-oriented architecture to deconstruct and make Informatica’s technologies more easily embeddable into third-party tools and/or cloud-based services.

This is not the first time that Informatica has promoted an OEM technology and go-to-market strategy for its products. But Vibe marks the first time that Informatica is enabling OEM partners to embed pieces of its capabilities, rather than entire Informatica products, opening the possibility of competing head-on with low-cost/no-cost rivals who have staked out the entry level of the ETL and data quality markets.

Technology is only the first step; to capitalize on Vibe, Informatica must adapt its sales and go-to-market model so it …

Although being technically in operation for three and a half years, Amazon’s RDS database never made general release until now. Along with the public unveiling, the service has gained a useful SLA for some peace of mind.

RDS stands for Relational Database Service. This hosted database service includes the full package, from set-up, to operations, and through to scaling.

Amazon note any pre-existing Applications, Tools, or Code which IT staff are already using on their databases can still be used on RDS.

One of the most appealing factors of Amazon’s solution is the SLA, which is offered for customers with databases in multiple places. This agreement means the service must meet a 99.95 uptime, equating to a maximum of 22 minutes downtime per month.

If the availability drops below this percentage, the refund is calculated as a percentage of the charge paid to Amazon on your monthly …

Like businesses across all sectors of the economy, cloud service providers are far from immune to the worst ravages of the recession.

But when a provider does go bust what happens to the businesses that have put their faith, money and resources in finding a suitable partner and are now threatened with losing services, resources and data as a result of their collapse?

For many organisations, the main challenge is: when their data is held in the cloud; how do they retain control and ownership of it when their service provider goes under – and how easy is it to transfer that data to another service provider? Just as importantly: what mechanisms does the existing provider have in place to protect them if the worst does happen?

Typically, when organisations acquire on-premise software, it is written into their contract that they get control of the code in the event that the …

Tech giant IBM has announced the acquisition of cloud infrastructure provider SoftLayer, evidently hoping to strengthen IBM’s position in the cloud infrastructure as a service space.

It’s not hard to imagine the reasons around this. Dallas-based SoftLayer calls its platform “cloud without compromise”, and describes itself as the largest privately held cloud infrastructure provider in the world.

IBM’s cloud portfolio certainly hits home enterprise-side, particularly with its public backing of OpenStack, and SoftLayer’s technology will give the enterprises a wider range of cloudy options.

Therefore, it’s the perfect sort of company for IBM to swallow up, and adds another player into the bubbling IaaS mix.

The past couple of months have seen acquisitions, launches and rollouts galore from major players looking to get ahead in the race – or, perhaps more pertinently, get closer to Amazon, as CloudTech examined yesterday.

From Google’s Compute Engine release …

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you’ve got to give Amazon.com credit. Not only is Amazon Web Services (AWS) the undisputed leader in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market, they are moving faster than their competition. Try as their competitors might, they all appear to be losing ground to this Cloud juggernaut.

Amazon’s low-cost Wal-Mart strategy of continually lowering prices as they achieve ever-greater economies of scale is squeezing the profitability of direct competitors, forcing most of them to look for niches Amazon hasn’t targeted…yet.

In fact, Amazon has built a classic virtuous cycle. They got IaaS to work, disrupting the pre-existing data center outsourcing market. They achieved market dominance, enabling them to be the low-cost leader. And they figured out how to scale, facilitating unlimited growth.

This lethal combination of market forces positions them to grow ever larger as they squash competitors like bugs under their sandals …

Before block storage in the cloud, when businesses needed to provision large amounts of storage – for server data, for example – they’d need to requisition and pay for huge server instances, even if the capacity and compute power far exceeded their needs. 

Organizations now buy storage in «blocks» to exactly fit their needs, regardless of the size of their cloud server. The old way, when after you bought a server you would need to upgrade the entire system if you wanted to add more hard drive space, is over. Now you can just buy space as you go.

But which type of block storage is best for your business? That depends on what type of data you need to store and how frequently and easily you need to access that data. 

There are two options for cloud block storage depending on what type of information you need to store. Standard …

A report from Rackspace Hosting has concluded that, with the rise of wearable technology, it will drive the rise of the “human cloud”.

Cloud computing has become an integral facet of the rise in wearable tech, with the rich data available at a user’s command all being easily stored in the cloud.

As a result the report, ‘The Human Cloud: Wearable Technology from Novelty to Productivity’, examined the responses of 4000 UK and US adults, as well as collaborating with experts from the Centre for Creative and Social Technology (CAST). The key takeaways were:

• 82% of wearable tech users in America, and 71% in Britain believed that these devices have “enhanced their lives”
• More than four in five (87% US, 81% UK) respondents believe that wearable tech has improved their personal abilities
• Just under half (47%) of wearable tech users “felt more intelligent” whilst 61% “felt more informed”, with …

Some manufacturers recently have made an impact with a “five nines” uptime guarantee, so I thought I’d provide some perspective.

Most recently, I’ve come in contact with Hitachi’s guarantee. I quickly checked with a few other manufacturers (e.g. Dell EqualLogic) to see if they offer that guarantee for their storage arrays, and many do…but realistically, no one can guarantee uptime because “uptime” really needs to be measured from the host or application perspective. Read below for additional factors that impact storage uptime.

Five Nines is 5.26 minutes of downtime per year, or 25.9 seconds a month.

Four Nines is 52.6 minutes/year, which is one hour of maintenance, roughly.

Array controller failover in EQL and other dual controller, modular arrays (EMC, HDS, etc.) is automated to eliminate downtime. That is really just the beginning of the story. The discussion with my clients …