Big data: You’ll have it, but can you handle it?
In 1999, I was called in to troubleshoot a customer’s client/server application that had recently failed a government acceptance test by taking more than 20 minutes to complete queries during stress testing. After months of intense software redesign that included overcoming pushback from a recalcitrant software development team, we were able to increase query performance by 2,000 percent, and the system subsequently passed its acceptance test.
Really Remote Data
Researchers at Cambridge University want to put data centers in places so remote they aren’t on any power grid. Their models indicate that moving data-hungry computation to places such as scorching deserts, windswept peaks, and the middle of the Atlantic Ocean—all rich in sunlight and wind energy—could allow this otherwise unharvestable energy to do useful work.
Learning the Right Lessons from the Amazon Outage
Amax Rolls Out New Cloud Appliance for SMBs
CloudMax is an on-premises, x86-based private cloud appliance that integrates hardware, storage, networking, virtualization and dynamic management to create a private cloud environment.
Building a smart engine for multi-cloud, highly available IaaS
Grazed from CloudNod. Author: Scott Sanchez.
I’ve been having a conversation on twitter with @reillyusa this morning about how a “cloud of clouds” could help prevent a single point of failure like we saw take down so many sites yesterday due to issues at AWS. One availability zone or region goes down at AWS? No problem, as service levels started to degrade your apps/data/state/etc was moved to another zone or to Rackspace or someone else. The engine would reduce the cost of having HA because it would make smart decisions about where, how and why to move workloads, and could even have a bunch of hot/warm instances running that are transparently shared across users to reduce the cost of having your own ‘dedicated’ instances at other clouds waiting for you to fail…
Amazon EC2 Day 2: Assessing The Damage
The crash of Amazon’s cloud services for web sites, EC2, is now in its second day.
The service went down yesterday at 1:42am PT, shutting down the websites of a number of start-up companies, including Foursquare, Quora and Reddit.
When the Web Went Away
Swaths of the Web disappeared yesterday, revealing just how heavily many of its users have unwittingly come to rely on Amazon for more than just their shopping. The retailer also rents out servers to other companies building websites, and one of the huge warehouses full of those computers began to experience problems early on Thursday with widespread effects.
Amazon issue wreaks havoc on many sites
Major websites including Foursquare and Reddit crashed or suffered slowdowns Thursday after technical problems rattled Amazon.com’s widely used Web servers, frustrating millions of people who couldn’t access their favorite sites.
Segmenting customer databases helps improve email marketing campaigns
To get the most out of email marketing campaigns, businesses in New Zealand should make sure they consider who they are sending messages to.
Writing for Fresh Business Thinking, digital director of Blueleaf, Rob Smith said that it is important that firms don’t simply send communications to their full customer email address database.
"Just think for a second. Out of your few thousand people, are they really all meant to get the same message? Do they have the same characteristics, buying patterns or personalities? No they do not, far from it," he wrote.
Former Cisco engineer faces extradition to US over hacking charges
A one-time Cisco engineer who had sued his former employer, alleging it monopolised the business of servicing and maintaining Cisco equipment, has been charged by US authorities with hacking.
Peter Alfred-Adekeye, who left Cisco in 2005 to form two networking support companies, has been charged with 97 counts of intentionally accessing a protected computer system without authorisation for the purposes of commercial advantage, according to an arrest warrant. He faces 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted on the charges.