In a previous post, Quocirca discussed how the cloud can be used to provide levels of business continuity and disaster recovery to meet an organisation’s needs around its own business risk profile.

However, data can be stored in many formats, and the granularity of this storage can have an impact on how well an organisation can recover information, function or transactions. There are three basic levels to consider: files, storage images and applications.

First, at the file level, the most common form of a need of data recovery is the loss of a single file. A user may have deleted the file by mistake, may have over-written it or may just have mislaid it. The best way to recover such a file is to have a mirrored copy of the primary file store it resides in – provided [...]

Many organisations look to the cloud to provide some level of contingency against their own systems failing, be it through the use of off data backup, failover servers for business applications or the use of high-availability servers and software. Doing so provides a level of disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC), the level of which can vary according to a given organisation’s risk appetite and budget. In this context, disaster recovery looks at how rapidly an organisation can get back a level of capability after the failure of a system, whereas business continuity covers how well an organisation can keep working through such a failure.

The degree to which cloud services are suitable for providing a safety blanket will vary from one case to another. So which one is right for your organisation?

The following use case scenarios provide [...]

One issue that needs to be addressed when implementing or procuring a hosted service is latency – what is generally perceived to be the time it takes for a response to come back from the provider’s data centre after an action is taken out on an end user device. In the majority of cases, even a good connection between the access device and the hoster’s data centre will result in a round trip latency of around one third to one half second.  However, in reality, “latency” is far more often a measure of the user’s happiness with the overall response of the system – which is a completely different problem.

Geography does play a part – the speed of light will always be a limiting factor, and as such, a data centre in America will have higher built-in latencies than one [...]

When considering two or more items, there is the concept of “comparing apples with apples” – i.e. making sure that what is under consideration is being compared objectively. Therefore, comparing a car journey against an air flight for getting between London and Edinburgh is reasonable, but the same is not true between London and New York.

The same problems come up in the world of virtualised hosting. Here, the concept of a standard unit of compute power has been wrestled with for some time, and the results have led to confusion. Amazon Web Services (AWS) works against an EC2 Compute Unit (ECU), Lunacloud against a virtual CPU (vCPU). Others have their own units, such as Hybrid Compute Units (HCUs) or Universal Compute Units (UCUs) – while others do not make a statement of a nominal unit at all.

Behind the [...]

Cloud computing promises much when it comes to the capability to move workloads between dedicated private and shared public infrastructure so the that the use of resources can grow and shrink as needed. As mentioned in the last post from Quocirca, the strong growth in the adoption of private cloud is good for public cloud providers, providing there is the capability to port workloads between the two.

The promise is good, but in many cases, the implementation has left much to be desired. The main problem is that there are a multitude of cloud platforms that have been built either on existing underpinnings of old-style operating systems and application server stacks (and as such struggle to scale and share resources), or that they have been built in a proprietary manner (and as such can only share workloads or [...]