Canada as Major Cloud Provider for North America

Recently, Canada's CTO Jirka Danek gave a speech where he highlighted the opportunities in cloud and green IT for Canada. Bill St. Arnaud's blog carried the details. The arguments for Canada include: Well positioned to become a world leader in…

Microsoft Sidekick Data Loss Not a Blow to Cloud

Stemming from the Microsoft Sidekick Data Loss event, some are highlighting the dangers of cloud computing. Of course there is also the contrarian view too. But the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Is cloud computing dangerous? As with many things,…

Rackspace Data Center Outage: Cause for Concern or Time for a Change in Strategy?

Rackspace, a popular hosting provider in the cloud, suffered a significant outage on June 29, 2009. Apparently, a power interruption caused their Dallas (DFW-Grapevine) data center to go offline. Rackspace has posted a copy of the incident report here: http://www.rackspace.com/downloads/pdfs/DFWIncidentReport6-29-2009.pdf…

Cap and Trade Impact on Data Centers

Cap and trade is a relatively new threat to data centers. However, the concept is not new; having been around for decades. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a website dedicated to their programs. http://www.epa.gov/captrade/ The cap and…

Strategic Impact of Acquisitions: Oracle Acquisition of Virtual Iron Example

This week’s announcement of Oracle’s (NYSE: ORCL) acquisition of Virtual Iron caused a bit of a stir. Oracle’s press release is a bit vague and financial terms were not disclosed: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/018535 The acquisition acknowledges an architectural shift toward a collapsed…

Should Google Outage Cause Change in Cloud Computing Strategy?

Google suffered an outage this week that left 14% of their users headed to sites in China rather than the US. As such, a traffic jam between the US & Asia ensued. Google’s SVP of Operations posted an update to…