Computerworld – Dealing with outages – are we ready?

This vendor-written opinion has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

The powerful storms that recently hit the mid-Atlantic region caused electrical outages that in turn disrupted Amazon’s EC2 services. The impact to the consumers and businesses that depend on the Amazon cloud have been well chronicled.

Amazon is a leader in reliability and, if it happens to them, it can and will happen to any service provider. The point is that in order to maintain business continuity, enterprises need to take responsibility for planning their outage contingencies.

The problem is that business processes, applications and computing infrastructure are too intertwined and dependent on each other. If the infrastructure isn’t configured just right or is unavailable, the business process stops. The industry has made great strides in abstracting the physical computing infrastructure from the applications it supports. Amazon and VMware have created tremendous value and built businesses by abstracting (or insulating) applications and users from hardware diversity and failures.

Dealing with outages — are we ready? – Computerworld

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.