Can the cloud withstand a “perfect storm’?
October 28, 2012
Cloud computing providers such as Amazon Web Services are facing another test of reliability as Hurricane Sandy moves up the East Coast toward a date with two other significant weather systems. Weather forecasters are predicting a strong, wide, slow-moving storm that is likely to hit hard even in areas not in the storm’s direct path.
Even in areas that won’t see the worst of the storms (as of this writing, New England seems ticketed for the heaviest hit), a couple days of heavy rains and high winds are expected to take down trees and power lines, taking websites and Web services with them in some places. It’s nothing new — AWS, for example, lost power to its Northern Virginia data center during June’s derecho storm in in the Mid-Atlantic states, and with it service to some high-profile sites…
AWS, which claims 300 U.S. government agencies and 1,500 educational institutions as customers, has had other hiccups at its Northern Virginia center, including losing service in April 2011 to a remirroring problem, suffering a partial outage in June, and being hit with another outage earlier this week. Microsoft, another large cloud provider, has had a few problems of its own.
Outages happen. But can agencies that rely on cloud services do anything about it? Probably the most reliable step is to use multiple availability zones — that is, getting services from more than one data center — which provides geographic redundancy. So if service goes out in Amazon’s Northern Virginia center, it can be switched over to another site. Amazon does provide this service, though at a price. For agencies, the question is whether the uptime is worth the extra money…
Read more from the source @ http://gcn.com/blogs/pulse/2012/10/hurricane-sandy-aws-cloud-computing.aspx