Links List 7.25.08

Amazon has experienced more downtime this week and had to reboot S3 on Sunday, leaving many wondering if cloud computing is really all it’s made out to be. Questions on cloud computing and reliability, SLA agreements and how much downtime is too much were asked. On a positive note, it seems Amazon has learned from their past mistakes, and made a great effort to keep users informed of the outage.

Speaking of downtime, a disaster recovery plan is often overlooked by IT operations teams. A recent article in PC World, Seven Things IT Should Be Doing (but Isn’t) points to preventing downtime and having a plan as an important rule of thumb for IT professionals. Many organizations think they have a disaster recovery plan in place, only to find out too late it’s inadequate. “You’d be surprised how much downtime happens — as well as lost goodwill from clients and vendors — when you lose your data.”

Cloud computing may be rapidly replacing virtualization as the buzz word for the year, but in reality, the job market begs to differ. A study by Infoworld states that jobs are set to drop in 2009, with almost no investment in cloud computing. Server virtualization and server consolidation are the No. 1 and No. 2 priorities. Following these two are cost cutting, application integration, and datacenter consolidation. At the bottom of the list of IT priorities are grid computing, open source software, content management, and cloud computing (called on-demand/utility computing in the survey) — less than 2 percent of the respondents said cloud computing was a priority.

Green technology remains a hot topic, with venture capital firms investing in green technologies. In fact, the recent race to “go green” has created a need for experts in carbon information and those who understand how to reduce and monitor an organization’s carbon footprint.

Martin MacLeod asks, “could the data center in a container be the ultimate virtualization platform for the enterprise or consultancy?”

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Filed Under: Business Continuity, Cloud Computing, Downtime, IT Operations, Virtualization