In a world of automation and set it and forget it IT resources, there is something quaint about physically handling a piece of equipment nightly, especially equipment based on technology that was invented nearly 70 years ago, back in 1951. What equipment am I talking about? Nope, I’m not talking about the phone system or…
It’s June 12, 2014, and I’m in beautiful Vancouver, B.C., working a booth at VMware’s VMUG UserCon. I’ve now been a solutions architect at SimpliVity for two months covering the Pacific Northwest and I’m excited to be spreading the word about this new technology called hyperconvergence. As people approach the booth to investigate this new…
Hurricanes cause significant damage to anyone in their path. As IT leaders, we can’t help but think about the disruption they also bring to organizations with data centers that host critical applications. We have yet to see the full impact of this year’s storms on IT operations at major companies, but if history is any…
Backing up data to the cloud sounds like a great idea. But, then what? You’ve decided to take the plunge, now you have to start the journey. I talked about other parts of backup and recovery in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series. There are several factors to consider when making the switch…
Major hyperscale cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure provide a high number of nines percentage (e.g., 99.99999 percent) of application uptime per year. However, as they are complex systems, they still cannot guarantee perfection. This fact was highlighted by an outage on Feb. 28, 2017, attributable to human error, which affected multiple…
A squirrel chewing through wires outside Yahoo’s data center in 2010. A ship dropping anchor on communication lines running underwater. There are some odd, nearly impossible occurrences that have caused unplanned downtime. Yet the most common cause of data center outages remains human error. And the more public the use of the facility, the more…
