Links List 6.13.08

Posted June 13th, 2008 by Joe Pendry

In light of Amazon’s latest downtime issues, Gigaom explains why Amazon went down and why it matters. In a thorough explanation, Gigaom bets the problem to be with the CDN or AFE. The moral of their story is to look into the global server load balancing and making sure to have geographically distributed data centers.

InfoWorld reports that Symantec is releasing a virtualization package that includes the vendor’s own management software with Citrix Xen hypervisor. The tool was announced this week in conjunction of the Symantec Vision 2008 conference.

Will the 3G iPhone release cause websites to clog up and go down? The Rogers site had some issues recently, and we’ll check in next week to see how it all turned out.

Cloud computing continues to be a hot topic, and Alan Shimel’s recent post on SYS-CON brings up questions of infrastructure and SaaS. He points out that, “it is easy to dismiss Don Dodge’s piece today asking ‘Do You Really Want Your Data in the Cloud?‘ as a Microsoft guy defending their turf. ” He uses some recent uptime problems at Amazon, Twitter, Disqus and Typepad to show that keeping your information in the cloud and relying on the net to deliver your applications gives you less control, less security, less scalability and less reliability.”

Transitioning to enterprise storage? Make sure that you are testing the configuration. According to TechRepublic, “when you provision a system, you should go through a testing process that checks I/O performance on the shared storage and accounts for the loss of a path or link down in the connection. You should also know what tools you can use to add, remove, and modify storage while a system is online. You do not want to go through the discovery process on a live system.” A virtual environment will be a lifesaver in this case.