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…