Owner: IT's About Uptime URL:http://www.stacksafe.com/blog Join Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2007 12:59:02 -0600 Rating:0 Site Description: Our goal at “IT’s About Uptime” is to initiate an ongoing dialogue with IT Operations professionals about technologies, trends and solutions related to keeping their companies’ IT services up and running. We’ll examine what it takes for companies to meet Site statistics:Click here
A Tale of Two Outages 2008-06-11 11:15:06 Two downtime incidents crossed our paths recently that we thought deserved comment. You probably have read about the first (Amazon), but maybe missed the second (Southern Company Nuclear Power Plant).
Amazon
Let’s look at the Amazon downtime first. I haven’t seen a cause, but the WSJ business technology blog sees the top two contenders for a likely [...]
Links List 6.20.08 2008-06-20 12:38:59 Google and Firefox both saw downtime this week. Google App Engine went down for a brief period on Tuesday, causing developers much angst as they could not access their management consoles. Interestingly enough, there was no mention of the downtime on their blog. Firefox also saw a brief period of downtime on Tuesday, due to [...]
The Hidden Costs of Heterogeneous Operating System Environments 2008-06-19 18:00:29 Often we praise the advantages of a heterogeneous operating system environment to support multi-tier business applications and IT services. We can pick the best operating system for each component of the software infrastructure stack. We have better security, because we are using different operating systems for different components of our application. We manage costs better, [...] Read more:Hidden
, Costs
, Operating
, System
Links List 7.3.08 2008-07-03 10:00:59 Microsoft finally released their key feature of Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V. The download allows people to run multiple OSes under one physical Windows Server. Although many were excited about this release, some still question if Microsoft can stay afloat against virtualization frontrunner VMWare. Only time will tell.
Data centers are going green – because they need [...]
Disaster Recovery and Virtualization at Gartner IOM 2008-07-01 18:53:56 Today’s post wraps up our thoughts on the Gartner
Infrastructure and Operations Management conference. One of the more interesting presentations we attended focused on the advantages of using virtualization for disaster recovery testing. John Morency, Research Director led a session on this topic.
As we heard from a number of presenters throughout the week, John noted [...] Read more:Disaster
, Recovery
Links List 6.27.08 2008-06-27 11:00:07 Cloud computing is a seriously hot topic. Alistair Croll at Bitcurrent (and GigaOm) breaks it down into two simple thoughts though. The first one’s pretty basic: Don’t use someone who can’t keep their cloud running. The second one is less obvious: The value of a cloud service isn’t just what it does; it’s also how [...]
Gartner IOM Conference: CMDB Success 2008-06-26 19:05:30 Another topic that was popular during the recent Gartner
Infrastructure Operations Management show this week was the change management database or CMDB. Patricia Adams, Gartner Research Director and Ronni Colville, Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst hosted a session titled “Ensuring Your CMDB Success
”.
Because there are many views and statistics being thrown around about the CMDB [...]
Doug McClure: Thoughts on BSM, ITSM, Change and Release Management 2008-06-25 09:15:20 A couple weeks ago, I had a chance to speak with Doug McClure about his perceptions in regards to Business Service Management
(BSM), IT Service Management (ITSM), and its relationship to Change
and Release
Management. Doug is a Senior Managing Consultant for Business and IT Service Management within the IBM Tivoli Lab Services (ISST) organization, [...]
Links List 7.18.08 2008-07-18 20:00:07 During the first half of 2008, Royal Pingdom surveyed 13 of the top news websites in the world and found that five of them had more downtime then the other eight. Those who had 99.9% uptime were Forbes, New York Times, CNN, Voice of America, Washington Post, Bloomberg, BBC News and Guardian Unlimited. However, out [...]
IT – Are you getting ‘noticed’? 2008-07-17 15:45:48 I wanted to share some concepts from an interesting keynote address from the America’s SAP User Group (ASUG) meeting being held in Toronto this week, which StackSafe helped sponsor (thank-you-very-much).
The ‘theme’ of this UG was all about upgrading SAP, primarily from several earlier versions to ECC 6.0 and EP7. If you’re a SAP upgrade [...]
The Data Center Building Project, Straddling Physical and Virtualized Environments 2008-07-16 06:00:38 As we have blogged in the past, virtualization is one of the hot topics in IT Operations for 2008. There’s continuous press coverage about the trend. Bloggers like Tarry Singh and Dan Kusnetzky focus on all aspects of virtualization. It is difficult to fathom the future of IT Operations without considering the significant impact that [...] Read more:Center
, Building
, Project
IT Consumerization – Déjà Vu All Over Again 2008-07-11 14:25:23 I ran across an interesting post entitled Analysis: IT consumerization and the future of work by Jon Stokes, Senior Editor and co-founder of ars technica.
Let me quote from John’s concluding paragraph to set the stage for this post:
“Ultimately, the Web as a software stack is robust enough to deliver networked apps and messaging, and consumer-level [...] Read more:Again
Links List 7.11.08 2008-07-11 09:32:43 Downtime seems to be a big issue for several companies this week. Google is the newest addition to downtime’s hit list. Google Docs went down for about 45 minutes on Tuesday after a string of features on the site stopped working.
As much press as Twitter stirred up with downtime reports, the infamous micro-blogging site’s efforts [...]
Reflections on Unplanned Downtime 2008-07-10 12:00:19 This Sunday, the New York Times joined the conversation on downtime, with an article titled “As Web Traffic Grows, Crashes Take Bigger Toll.”
The article made several points familiar to readers of IT’s About Uptime, including
Downtime
causes significant user frustration.
There has been significant, public downtime of both well known “web 2.0” properties as well as back [...] Read more:Reflections
Transforming IT Into a Strategic Asset Through Core Infrastructure 2008-07-08 17:00:29 While at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2008, we visited a wide variety of interesting sessions. In this blog post, we will focus on a session of particular interest to readers of IT’s About Uptime - Transforming IT into a StrategicAsset
through Core Infrastructure
led by the General Manager of Infrastructure Servers at [...]
Is Testing Overrated? 2008-08-05 16:30:01 Luke Franci and Matt Heuser think that TESTING IS OVERRATED (gasp!), at least according to recent blog posts from both under that title. Matt’s August 1st post at Creative Chaos provided an intro to Luke’s July 11 post at Rail Spikes .
Upon further review it’s clear that developer/QA code testing is their focus, and the [...] Read more:Testing
Sam Nurmi of Pingdom Talks About Uptime and Downtime 2008-08-04 08:30:34 Founder of Pingdom, Sam Nurmi, shares his reasons for starting the uptime monitoring service and his views on downtime. Prior to Pingdom, Sam was the CEO of Sweden’s biggest web hosting company, Loopia, which he sold in 2005.
Pingdom oversees uptime monitoring needs for 90% of the companies in the world, promising to maintain the [...] Read more:Downtime
Links List 8.1.08 2008-08-01 11:07:11 Downtime continues to be a hot issue, not only for servers and websites, but for e-mail. 52 percent of companies have experienced an email failure in the past 12 months, according to backup and archiving supplier, Iron Mountain Digital. Of those companies, one third had outages of two hours or longer and 17 percent were [...]
Case Study on the Cost of Downtime: Amazon S3 Outage 2008-07-31 18:35:08 What Happened
On July 20th, Amazon
’s S3 service offerings experienced a wide scale service outage. As a primary cloud based infrastructure, the outage disrupted a wide variety of websites, users and providers. The outage was heavily publicized in the mainstream media and in the blogosphere. Unlike the February S3 outage, Amazon provided significant detail about [...] Read more:Downtime
, Study
The Responsibility for Increasing Uptime - Where Does the Buck Stop in IT Operations? 2008-07-30 20:00:26 Unplanned downtime has and continues to be at the top of lists of problems facing IT operations organizations. Considering the amount of focus and importance placed on the cost of downtime, one natural question is to identify the internal champion for increased uptime inside the IT organization.
To date, we have found that the job of [...] Read more:Responsibility
, Increasing
Links List 7.25.08 2008-07-25 09:30:57 Amazon has experienced more downtime this week and had to reboot S3 on Sunday, leaving many wondering if cloud computing is really all it’s made out to be. Questions on cloud computing and reliability, SLA agreements and how much downtime is too much were asked. On a positive note, it seems Amazon has learned from [...]
My Application – My Testing Maturity 2008-07-24 22:19:03 Change management maturity – meaning the measure of success in making and releasing changes to a production environment – is a multi-dimensional challenge. Not only do IT groups achieve different levels of change management maturity according to the practices and guidelines that they follow, but change management maturity is also determined by the type of [...] Read more:Testing
, Application
, Maturity
Webinar on Application Selection and Testing Maturity 2008-07-22 22:20:41 IT’s About Uptime blogger and StackSafe Sr. Product Manager Dennis Powell will be presenting on a webinar titled “The Influence of Application
Selection on Testing
and Change Management.” The webinar, hosted by Ecora Software, will discuss findings from the latest study conducted by StackSafe and Research Edge about testing maturity and complexity of various applications. [...] Read more:Maturity
Links List 8.22.08 2008-08-22 10:58:36 Want to know the 10 worst web glitches of 2008 so far? Included in this list of sites of major crashes and/or downtime are Amazon S3, Twitter and Netflix.
Microsoft and VMware connect. VMware has now joined the Server Virtualization Valdiation Program (SVVP). According to the Burton Group, Microsoft’s applications and operating systems will be fully [...]
The Perpetual SAP Testing Cycle? 2008-08-21 19:00:51 With the end-of-life for SAP release 3 4.6C approaching, and with the new release of SAP v6, it’s time for organizations to migrate their SAP environment. However, unlike SAP migrations in the past, this process should prove to be different, depending on the priority of business function components to the organization.
SAP should be lauded for [...] Read more:Testing
, Cycle
Are You Ready for the “IT’s About Uptime Top 25″? 2008-08-20 16:00:45 Some of us at IT’s About Uptime like college football (Roll Tide!) and can’t wait to get into college football season. So we were inspired by the recent Top 25 rankings for college football teams to put an arbitrary list together that ranks the great number of blogs out there that we’re reading.
I’d like [...]
Kerrie Meyler, a Microsoft MOM MVP, Dishes About IT Operations 2008-08-19 22:00:32 Last year, we met Kerrie Meyler, an independent consultant and trainer, through a blog post she wrote about downtime and the importance of IT management operations. Her insight and experience is what drew us to further expand the conversation we had a year ago about downtime and upgrade management. In addition to those topics, [...] Read more:Microsoft
Links List 8.15.08 2008-08-15 17:00:51 Netflix, the online DVD rental service company, experienced the “worst major outage in its history”. Due to the outage, the company could not ship their DVDs to 1/3 of their 8.4 million customers in the past few days. The issue was reported with the computer systems, citing that they would “leave the company unable to [...]
Virtualization Bug Raises Downtime Concerns 2008-08-13 19:30:28 We’ve blogged in the past about how virtualization adds to the complexity of production systems and – as a result – can cause problems for organizations with regard to downtime. Yesterday, the implications were made apparent when a VMWare software error prevented customers from powering up a virtual machine. Virtualization.info has a good summary of [...] Read more:Downtime
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