“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

Mark Russinovich is a legendary figure in the IT world because of his company Sysinternals.
He did so much reverse engineering of the Windows kernel that he ended up knowing it as much as the Microsoft architects. Microsoft acquired his company in 2006 and appointed him as Technical Fellow.

So far, his job has been related to the development of the Windows kernel (Windows 7 and beyond), taking care that its architecture was fully virtualization-aware.
Now a Microsoft developer evangelist, Matthijs Hoekstra, reports that he moved to the Windows Azure team.

While this may be completely unrelated, it seems yet another sign that Microsoft is preparing to launch the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) component of Azure. 
While the platform is powered by a variant of Hyper-V, so far Microsoft only exposed its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capabilities. But company clarified in multiple occasions (here and here for example) that Azure will compete with Amazon EC2 in offering hosted virtual machines.

Thanks to ZDNet for the news.

http://cloudcomputing.info/en/news/2010/08/mark-russinovich-joins-the-windows-azure-team.html

Jon Brodkin, Network World Wednesday, July 28, 2010