A friend of mine from my IBM days (an expert in Data Warehousing, BI, etc.) told me about the Hadoop conference he attended in San Jose few weeks back. When he attended the same conference two years ago in New … Continue reading 
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Amazon’s Cloud Is Back Up
It took Amazon until midday Monday to say that its cloud was back up after it crashed in a nasty electrical storm on the East Coast Friday night bringing down Amazon-dependent companies like Netflix, Instagram, Heroku and Pinterest.
Hundreds of thousands of households were still without power Monday.
The thunderstorm blew out power for a little while at its giant Virginia data center and Amazon’s backup power in one of its data centers longer.
It’s the third time Amazon has gone down since April. It experienced a power outage in Virginia a couple of weeks ago.
This time EC2, Relational Database, Elastic MapReduce, Elastic Beanstalk and Elastic Block Storage services in at least one of the 10 data centers it reportedly has in Virginia were impacted. Some writes to EBS weren’t saved or didn’t update various volumes.
Most services seem to have come back by Saturday but Amazon remained tight-lipped about it until Monday when it claimed only a single digit percentage of its customers had been affected.
The impacted Amazon customers don’t seem to have invested in disaster recovery and redundancy in another availability zone.
Amazon Cloud: Is the Sky Really Falling?
I’ll keep this story short, so as not to strain the cloud unduly.
Amazon’s latest, unfortunate outage has brought out the Chicken Littles for a return appearance – gloating pullets who take seeming pleasure in mocking cloud computing and its potential.
Of course, electricity is still out in many places where AWS is back in. Losing electricity can be said to be more of an inconvenience than losing Netflix, yet few people are calling for a return to candles and natural breezes as the way to light and cool our homes.
I wonder how many private datacenters went down in the recent mid-Atlantic storm, and how many companies had their bacon saved – or kept their bacon – in outsourced redundant systems. How many times did cloud computing save non-cloudy companies over the week-end, versus the number of cloud systems that went down?
In the end, I will bet my 40 acres and a mule that lack of redundancy was once again the root problem here. Too many companies seem to want cloud on the cheap – no insurance needed as the made a mad dash toward the bottom line. Amazon in the past has implied that its failures stemmed from a lack of failover provisioning by stingy customers. Will it do more than imply that this time around?
It takes a long time for technological change to make itself complete. I had a boss in the late 80s who refused to allow voicemail in the office because he thought it made people hide behind their phones. A major hardware chain in the Northeast didn’t even have phones at that time because its management thought they made people lazy.
Amazon’s recent troubles are embarrassing, are fortuitously timed for Google to offer an allegedly more reliable alternative, and provide ample fodder for media know-nothings and knowledgeable industry revanchists.
To me, the troubles point out once again that you can’t do this stuff on the cheap. The opportunity cost of sticking with less elastic systems is tougher to measure than costs associated with outages, but nevertheless, far more companies have been sunk by opportunity costs over the decades than by an overly aggressive move to technology.
Cloud computing will be just fine, even as it leaves nay-sayers in the dust, shaking their fists at all this dad-gummed change.
Cloud vs Cloud
You’ve either read about or lived through the massive storm that hit the Mid-Atlantic coast last week. And, by the way, if you are going through a loss, damage or worse, I do hope you can recover quickly and wish you the best. The weather took out power for millions including a Virginia ‘cloud’ datacenter which hosts a number of entertainment and social media sites. Many folks looking to get thru the candle-lit evenings were without their fix. While there has been confusion and growing pains over the years as to just what ‘cloud computing’ is, this instance highlights the fact that even The Cloud is still housed in a data center, with four walls, with power pulls, air conditioning, generators and many of the features we’ve become familiar with ever since the early days of the dot com boom (and bubble). They are physical structures, like our homes, that are susceptible to natural disasters among other things. Data centers have outages all the time but a single traditional data center outage might not get attention since it may only involve a couple companies – when a ‘cloud’ data center crashes, it could impact many companies and like last week, it grabbed headlines.
Local File Server + Cloud-Based Team Folder
Local File Server for team collaboration is a very familiar use case. Typically a local IT administrator set up a file server in a Local Area Network(LAN) environment, such as in a branch office. The whole office then use network shares to share files. For example, below is a picture of a Shared folder in Windows File Server 2008. The local folder’s name is TeamFolderLocal and it is published as a network share.
Cloud-based team folder is also a very familiar use case. In Gladinet Cloud, the administrator can setup a team folder so anyone that has assigned read/write permission can access the team folder. Below is a picture of a team folder inside web browser.
Conference Guru Named “Media Sponsor” of Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that Conference Guru has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Conference Guru reviews thousands of conferences to find great conferences and establishes partnerships with the organizers that enable us to offer a limited quantity of conference passes at a great price. Conference Guru – Great Conferences. Great Deals.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Cloud Computing: Dell Gets Quest for $2.36 Billion
Dell has won the bidding war for Quest Software agreeing to pay $28 a share, a 50 cent improvement on its last bid.
That brings the price to $2.36 billion, which is what JPMorgan claimed the company was worth weeks ago.
Insight Venture Partners, which offered $23 a share back in March, had to bring in Vector Capital, another private equity firm, to offer a financed cash bid of $25.75 a share. Dell retorted with $27.50 or about $2.32 billion. That’s where things were last Monday with the ball in Insight’s court.
The equity boys had Quest CEO Vinny Smith, who owns 34% of the company, on their side. He reportedly preferred their deal because he could keep running the systems management company but they couldn’t put the financing together according to the Wall Street Journal.
Cloud Computing: Piston & Gridcentric to Deliver OpenStack-Based VDI
Piston Cloud Computing has arranged an exclusive license with Gridcentric, the virtualization optimization company.
Their partnership marks the first commercially available VDI solution built on OpenStack, the open source cloud framework Piston’s widgetry is built on.
Every Piston Enterprise OS license now includes Gridcentric’s Virtual Memory Streaming (VMS) technology. The arrangement is supposed to double virtual machine density for Piston customers and require less physical RAM without impacting user customization or application performance.
It’s Official: Dell To Acquire Quest for $2.4BN
«With this transaction,» said Vinny Smith, chairman and chief executive officer of Quest Software, «Quest’s products and employees become the foundation for Dell’s critical software business.» Smith’s statement came as Dell and Quest today announced they have entered into a definitive agreement for Dell to acquire Quest.
Scary App Games. SSL Without Benefit
Remember the Maginot line and how powerful and defensive it was going to be… And then the Germans just bypassed it? Remember the West Wall, where the Allies were going to throw themselves against in the waning days of World War II… And then it was not just pierced but effectively eliminated as a protective barrier in five days of fighting?
That’s what happens when you know you need a defense, and you place all of your eggs in one basket. At least in the IT world a little caution can save you a lot. Here’s a cautionary tale. We trust SSL explicitly, but from a “download random app X” perspective, that’s a mistake.