ENGINE Networks will be present at CEBIT in Hannover from 2nd of March 2010 to 6th of March 2010. You can find us in our stand B19.

New services, a clear display concept and a concerted campaign of visitor recruitment are designed to build on CeBIT’s strong position as the most important event of the year in the ICT business calendar.

CeBIT 2010 is going to be a highlight, so make sure you’re in on the action, presenting your products and solutions at the world’s No.1 digital marketplace!

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“The cloud” is still in its youth, maybe adolescence, so its easy to point fingers and scream when an outage occurs.  Just recently, Amazon Web Services had an outage in its Northern Virginia data center due to the failure of a power supply in an “availability zone” as well as a second failure of a component in the redundant system.  Outages happen, so it shouldn’t have been as big of a shock as it was made out to be.

However, when companies are beginning to outsource data center operations, they have high expectations, which is why zero failure is a good standard for providers to aim at in the clouds.  The fact is, all internal systems fail too, but there is no one to point the finger at.  When real people and real technology is involved, outages will occur.  I strongly feel that the cloud, outages or not, will have higher up-time and availability than most, if not all, internal systems.  High-profile clients, sensitive data and the fear of hundreds of clients yelling and screaming is enough motivation for any infrastructure as a service provider to architect a bullet-proof cloud.

At Engine Networks, we like happy clients, that’s why we promise 99.99% up-time and push every day to make our cloud bigger, better and stronger.

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Engine Networks NOC is working on a brand new fiber Gibabit upstream link. This link will add 1 Gbps of IP-Transit bandhwidth to the Engine Network Backbone.

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Symantec released its 2010 State of the Data Center study this week. The study conducted by Applied Research found that midsize enterprises of 2,000 to 9,999 employees are more likely to adopt technologies such as cloud computing, deduplication, replication, storage virtualization and continuous data protection than either small or large enterprise size businesses.

The study with 1,780 respondents showed that midsize enterprises also place a higher importance on staffing and training and are more likely to make changes to their data centers and add new applications.

Respondents listed their data center initiatives in order: security (83%), backup and recovery (79%), continuous data protection (76%), server virtualization and storage resource management. These initiatives were followed by data archiving, energy savings, server consolidation, replication of backup data and storage virtualization.

As for disaster recovery, 80% had confidence in their plan. One-third said they have a plan that is undocumented or needs work. Forty-one percent said that cloud computing was not covered in their existing disaster recovery plan, over one-fourth of the respondents said that remote office operations were not included and 23% said that they had ignored virtual servers in their disaster recovery plan. One-third of the respondents have not re-evaluated their disaster recovery plan in the last 12 months. Not a good record as far as disaster recovery goes.

The median for the respondents was six data centers. Over half of the respondents said that reducing costs was their primary objective for 2010, followed by improving responsiveness and improving service levels.

There’s a lot of important information in the rest of the report. Stay tuned for the next article to find out.

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