That is all fair and well until you either fall into the .01% of the time that is unavailable or a zone of the EBS cloud is not accessible. That is where an interesting technology was made available to me on highly-available cloud storage. Recently, I attended a Cloudcamp event that was a great resource to see what people are doing and to understand the technologies in play. Sure, there are plenty of sales opportunities at these events. What I found more interesting was access to how these technologies work as well as organizations that are already there.
One offering that caught my eye was the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network (SDN). The SDN can provide a 100% service level agreement (SLA) for certain configurations and data sizes. This would be a scenario where you have 5 TB of data or more in the SDN cloud and are selecting a data replication policy that covers 3 nodes (different datacenters in the Nirvanix namespace).
The underlying pre-requisite of course is that the customer can access the data. So, strategies of WAN failover or forcing all workers to telecommute can come into play.
Availability in the cloud is a contentious topic, as the TechRepublic community demonstrates. I am providing cloud resources so we can understand the technologies – I'm not necessarily saying we should go there. I am a big of a 'server-hugger', I will admit that. But I see cloud as the single biggest threat to internal IT infrastructure on the radar right now. Share your comments below.coming in another series of posts).
Transfer from TechReplublic, created 30th June 2009 by Rick Vanover.