Links List 8.1.08

Posted August 1st, 2008 by Joe Pendry

Downtime continues to be a hot issue, not only for servers and websites, but for e-mail. 52 percent of companies have experienced an email failure in the past 12 months, according to backup and archiving supplier, Iron Mountain Digital. Of those companies, one third had outages of two hours or longer and 17 percent were without email for more than eleven hours. Even though email outages are still a common occurrence, one fifth of companies stated they have zero tolerance for an outage. According to the research, 55 percent of companies are trying to reduce the volume of stored mail in Microsoft Exchange to reduce downtime.

Tracker Pirate Bay has experienced heavy downtime this week due to increased traffic. This traffic increase apparently caused quite a bit of stress on their server park, and they are now at the point where the current setup has trouble keeping up with the ever-growing demand.

HP, Yahoo and Intel announced this week their new cloud computing research initiative called the Cloud Computing Test Bed. This initiative will allow pre-selected researchers to build and launch new applications on the platform through the companies’ six cloud-computer research data centers, which are strategically located around the world. Researchers will examine how to make cloud computing more secure and reliable.

Yankee Group’s 2008-2009 Global Virtualization Deployment and Usage Survey validates virtualization as an enterprise solution of choice. According to the survey, about 72 percent of the businesses they surveyed affirmed that they have already ‘deployed or plan to deploy virtualization solutions. Other key findings show that 40 percent of the 750 IT administrators and C-level executives from 20 countries are deploying virtualization solutions from two or three different vendors.

Microsoft dishes about their latest project, Midori, a cloud computing operating system. Midori will focus on solely on cloud computing due to the widespread of high speed internet and because a server-style hardware system is more cost-effective. Planned release date for Midori will be post-2010.