Archive for the ‘Business Continuity’ Category
Topics around Business Continuity
Posted by brennels on August 4, 2010
“For SMBs who need to keep those servers rolling, Geminare shows that cloud-based server recovery can not only be affordable but also easy, and provide fast failback as well.
When I’ve talked to companies for articles about high availability, business continuity, or disaster recovery, particularly keeping server-oriented applications available, there’s often a Bermuda Triangle of handwaving fuzziness about the fail-over and the fail-back, glossing over the time and IT cost to get that transaction database up and running again, or to restore it when the main site is available again — hours to days to rebuilt a database, for example.
If I’m talking to a non-stop, fault-tolerant provider like Stratus, it doesn’t happen, but with many BC/DR solutions and their providers, it often feels like they’re being less than forthcoming about the realities. It often feels to me like while the acquisition cost of a fault-tolerant, high-availability solution may be greater than a BC/DR one (although not necessarily — see my ScaleMP post), but if there’s any actual need to utilize BC/DR, the total out-of-pocket cost including resuming operations can be higher (not to mention the cost of lost availability, productivity, and sales).”
Read the full article on informationweek.com
Posted in Business Continuity, Cloud Computing, Cloud Providers, Cloud Recovery, PaaS (Platform as a Service) | Tagged: Affordable cloud computing storage, Cloud computing for SMB's, Cloud Recovery | Leave a Comment »
Posted by brennels on July 6, 2010
If you are a fellow twit like me then you know the infamous fail whale but I bet you wonder how this is related to cloud computing? Twitter, like Google, Facebook, Myspace, etc… are all examples of the cloud computing platform Software as a Service. This basically means that you don’t care where the application or servers are running from. They could be located next door, in New York City or Hong Kong. All you care is that the service is available to use when you want to use it and obviously when you get the #Fail #whale the service is not usable.
This makes me wonder what is causing the fail whale at the primary data center. A cloud computing data center is nothing more than a bunch of virtual servers all linked together so they can share processing, memory and resource pools to provide high availability for critical application servers. However, should there be an issue with the primary virtual host server then there is something called Vmotion which moves the virtual machine resources from one machine to another where there are more resources available. This could very well be the reason for the fail whale message as the server that is trying to serve up the requests isn’t able to process those at the same time as it is trying to move the virtual machine to another virtual host… it is curious if this is the issue and wonder what that means for other companies and or services looking to use the cloud as their preferred platform.
What are your thoughts on the cause of the fail whale is it the cloud or just too many twits?
Posted in Business Continuity, Cloud Availability, Cloud Computing, Cloud Hosting, Cloud Providers, SaaS | Tagged: Cloud computing for social media, cloud SLA for critical applications, Twitter Fail Whale | Leave a Comment »
Posted by brennels on June 30, 2010
Posted by: Carl Brooks ITknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com
“Former ‘Master of Disaster’ at Amazon Jesse Robbins has a couple of fun tidbits to share about the birth of Amazon EC2. He said the reason it succeeded as an idea in Amazon’s giant retail machine was partly due to his inter-territorial corporate grumpiness and partly due to homesickness–not exactly the masterstroke of carefully planned skunkworks genius it’s been made out to be by some.
Robbins said Chris Pinkham, creator of EC2 along with Chris Brown (and later joined by Wiljem Van Biljon recruited in South Africa)was itching to go back to South Africa right around the time Amazon started noodling around with the idea of selling virtual servers. At the time, Robbins was in charge of all of Amazon’s outward facing web properties and keeping them running.
“Chris really, really wanted to be back in South Africa,” said Robbins, and rather than lose the formidable talent behind Amazon’s then VP of engineering, Amazon brass cleared the project and off they went with a freedom to innovate that many might be jealous of.”
Read the full article here on ITknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com
Posted in Amazon, Business Continuity, Cloud Architecture, Cloud Providers, IaaS, RaaS | Tagged: Amazon Web Services, Chris Pinkham, ec2, how to make a cloud, IaaS, Jesse Robbins, origin story | Leave a Comment »
Posted by brennels on June 28, 2010
“Ever since the introduction of Double-Take Cloud, we’ve been getting a lot of questions as to how our cloud systems are configured, where they are hosted, what type of VM hosts we’re running, etc. I thought it would be good to do a DT: 101 article on the fact that Double-Take Software is not, in fact, a cloud provider of any kind – which is saying a lot these days.
Everyone from Oracle to EMC is re-branding themselves as a “cloud company,” and for the most part they’re right on the money. Oracle has been offering Software as a Service (SaaS) for quite some time now, and EMC is a great platform to build a private cloud on (as are any of the other mass-storage providers). But this rush to re-brand as cloud companies can be confusing, especially when companies that make cloud-enabling technology (like Double-Take Cloud) can get muddled in with the cloud infrastructure providers.
So, for the record, Double-Take Software is not a cloud company. We do not host servers for Infrastructure on Demand, nor do we provide SaaS solutions, though Double-Take Cloud is pretty close to that last definition. What we are is a software company that makes quite a few technologies that can effectively power your cloud ambitions, and are used by many cloud companies as well.”
Read the rest of the article here http://userblog.doubletake.com/2010/06/21/double-take-101-nope-we-are-not-a-cloud-provider/
Posted in Business Continuity, Cloud Availability, Cloud Recovery, RaaS | Tagged: cloud backup and recovery, Double-Take Cloud, Double-Take Cloud Recovery, Double-Take Software, RaaS, Recovery as a service | Leave a Comment »
Posted by brennels on June 23, 2010
This is an ironic story I cam across today posted on informationweek May 13th, 2010 “Recovery.gov Moved To Amazon Cloud”. With all the talk about using the cloud for recovering servers the irony is that the economic recovery trackings system is being moved becuase SaaS and the SLA of Amazon EC2 is more cost effective than attempting to build the data infrastructure required to host such a high volume critical application. I wonder how long it will take the public sector to begin to realize these benefits of using cloud computing as a recovery platform?
“Recovery.gov Moved To Amazon Cloud” by J. Nicholas Hoover InformationWeek May 13, 2010 04:14 pm
“The federal government hopes moving the stimulus-tracking Web site to Amazon EC2 will allow the recovery board to save money and refocus on its core mission.
The federal government has moved Recovery.gov, the Web site people can use to track spending under last year’s $787 million economic stimulus package, to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud infrastructure-as-a-service platform, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board announced Thursday. The move marks a milestone for the Obama administration’s cloud computing initiative. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra said in a conference call with reporters it is the first government-wide system to move to a cloud computing infrastructure. It’s also the first federal government production system to run on Amazon EC2, Kundra said.”
Read the full story here on informationweek.com
Posted in Amazon, Business Continuity, Cloud Architecture, SaaS | Tagged: Amazon EC2, Cloud Recovery, Recovery.gov, SaaS, Software as a Services | Leave a Comment »
Posted by brennels on February 24, 2010
In the early 1990′s the then administration had intense discussions about what was important to economy and the phrase “It’s the Economy Stupid!” came to light and ultimately helped win the election in 1992. I was thinking about this the other day and realized this same phrase applies to server backup and recovery, then realized that it isn’t the backup that is important but more so the ability to recover. IT managers ever day perform backups to protect data, servers, applications in the event the need is to recover those systems but just because there is a duplicate copy never ensures the ability to recover that copy of the server workload in a timely manner. This is where many cloud providers as well as storage vendors may be making the same past mistakes utilizing proprietary solutions only between like hardware or infrastructure.
Just because data may be backed up to tape, disk, a data center or cloud computing infrastructure never guarantees the ability that it can be recovered quickly and efficiently to a new server or virtual machine. In fact, many pains IT managers face is that backups can’t be recovered to dissimilar hardware. If you have a backup of a HP or IBM blade, what are the changes of being able to restore that to a Dell PowerEdge. Probably not good! The challenge is the inoperability of compatible drivers and or hardware and not to mention licensing of recovering that workload to a new or different server that may be available.
Cloud backup and recovery solutions solve much of these issues. Virtualization certainly can add level of complexity to the situation but also greatly helps solve many of these issues. The great thing about being able to backup and recover to a virtual cloud platform as there is no need to care what the server is, just that there is the ability to spin up the virtual machine in the event of a failure and access the workload from the cloud. This is rapidly becoming the 4th dimension of cloud computing platforms, “recovery as a service” in addition to Paas, IaaS, and SaaS.
So just because you have a backup when was the last time there was an attempt to recover? Focusing on improving the speed and efficiency of the recovery process will be better spent than just throwing in another tape to make you feel good. This will also ensure when there is a disaster event there isn’t a scramble to find the latest backup because the recovery procedures have been well exercised and streamlined to bring business operations into production with minimal downtime. Improving recovery will not only let you sleep well at night but will make you a rock star when you can quickly bring workloads online and prove to your executive team everything is under control. So, it isn’t just about the backup it’s the recovery!
Posted in Backup and Recovery, Business Continuity, Cloud Recovery, RaaS | Tagged: Business Continuity, cloud backup and recovery, Cloud Computing, Cloud Disaster Recovery | Leave a Comment »
Posted by brennels on January 27, 2010
By Andrew Burton
“Many vendors are positioning cloud backup as an ideal disaster recovery solution, allowing users to replicate data offsite and outside of their company’s geographic region at a reasonable cost. And, there are even a number of so-called cloud disaster recovery services on the market today. But, what does “cloud disaster recovery” really mean?
In this tutorial on cloud disaster recovery, learn about cloud disaster recovery vs. cloud backup; hybrid disaster recovery approaches; and security concerns with cloud backup and disaster recovery.”
CLOUD DISASTER RECOVERY TUTORIAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
What is cloud disaster recovery?
Online data backup and recovery services
A hybrid approach to disaster recovery
Data center on demand
Security concerns with online backup
Read the full article here on SearchDisasterRecovery.com
Posted in Backup and Recovery, Business Continuity, Cloud Availability, Cloud Recovery | Tagged: Cloud Backup, Cloud Recovery, Disaster Recovery | 2 Comments »
Posted by brennels on January 13, 2010
OK I’m back from the holidays and just recently presented a webinar on how to protect entire virtual infrastructure in the cloud and the risks of having your entire datacenter residing on a few virtual servers. Unlike the old days if a server went down the only impact was what ever the application that was running on that server. Now with consolidated virtualized infrastructure if a physical server goes down there could be a dozen virtual machines go offline simultaneously. I believe Amazon still met the SLA but this article should serve as good information for anyone looking to implement a 100% virtualized environement without some sort of loal failover capabilities.
Carl Brooks, Technology Writer | SearchCloudComputing.com wrote a great article on the latest outage impact from an Amazon customer ”Heroku learns the hard way from Amazon EC2 outage“
Ruby on Rails Platform as a Service startup Heroku started off the new year with a nasty surprise. Without warning on January 2, all of the specialized, high-capacity Amazon EC2 instances that run its popular application and development service disappeared in the blink of an eye. Twenty-two virtual machines, approximately $20,000 per month in hosting fees for high-memory m2.2xlarge instances, suddenly vanished, leaving Heroku’s estimated 44,000 running applications in the lurch.
Amazon blamed a routing device in its Virginia data center, and the service was back up in an hour. But Oren Teich, Heroku’s product developer, said this is one of the many important lessons new ventures and businesses need to learn before they decide to work entirely in the cloud. Traditional contingency planning doesn’t go far enough, he said: expect the unexpected.
Read the full article here on SearchCloudComputing.com
Posted in Amazon, Backup and Recovery, Business Continuity, Cloud Availability, Cloud Providers, Cloud Recovery | Tagged: Amazon EC2, Disaster Recovery, searchcloudcomputing.com, Virtualization Risks | 1 Comment »
Posted by brennels on December 18, 2009
By Charles Babcock InformationWeek
December 15, 2009 08:55 AM
“Amazon Web Services has attributed a 44-minute outage in part of its Northern Virginia data center last week to the failure of power supply in one “availability zone” in the data center, which was soon followed by a second failure of a component in the redundant system.
Users of the Amazon EC2 cloud with workloads in Amazon’s Northern Virginia data center experienced problems early in the morning of December 9, with some operations in a part of the data center interrupted during a five-hour period.
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Amazon started notifying customers of a problem at 4:08 a.m. Eastern. By 9:41 a.m., it’s Amazon Service Health Dashboard reported that “we have completed recovery of most instances affected by this event.”
The postings first mentioned a connectivity issue, then acknowledged a power issue. In following up on the postings, InformationWeek asked Amazon whether the power issue was inside the data center or an issue with an external supplier.”
Read the rest of the article here on informationweek.com
Posted in Amazon, Business Continuity, Cloud Architecture, Cloud Providers | Tagged: Amazon EC2, Cloud Computing, Cloud Failure | Leave a Comment »
Posted by brennels on December 14, 2009
By Carl Brooks, Technology Writer
09 Dec 2009 | SearchCloudComputing.com
“Amazon Web Services (AWS) had a power failure at its flagship data center in the wee hours of the morning today, suffering from connectivity issues from about 4AM to 10AM Eastern Standard Time.
The cloud computing giant reported an “underlying power issue” that affected some instances in its US-EAST-1 availability zone. Amazon has four availability zones in the U.S., two on the East Coast and two on the West Coast.
The outage was irksome to users, but many gave Amazon points for better disclosure and fast response on the issue. Independent cloud monitoring services accurately reported the issue, a sign that public cloud services are gaining more traction.”
Read the full article here on SearchCloudComputing.com
Posted in Amazon, Business Continuity, Cloud Availability | Tagged: Amazon, Cloud Computing, Power Failure | Leave a Comment »
