Tag Archives: performance

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Service Outage Hits Home for Cloud Provider

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Are there blind spots in your service assurance approach?

Netflix, a provider of online streaming media, made news over the holidays when customers experienced a service outage on Christmas Eve.  Imagine taking the wrapping off of your new mobile device and deciding to try it out to stream a movie.   For those located in North America, you probably found that the Netflix movie streaming service was down. 

This outage was caused by issues within Amazon Web Services that Netflix employs to support movie streaming.  Initially, the Amazon support team pursued API errors before learning that the root cause of the outage was actually a configuration issue caused by human error.  This misstep ultimately delayed the restoration of service to Netflix customers.  Over the course of that day, the configuration error first manifested itself as performance degradation, and then cascaded to a full service outage for many customers. One way of avoiding a situation like this one could have been to take a more system-wide approach to service assurance. Continue reading →

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Service Assurance In The Cloud

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How do you provide service assurance in your virtualized data center or cloud?

Read any blog, online article, or hard copy publication about the IT industry and you will likely see much about the future of IT. But, it is the every-day challenges and victories that often determine success in the long run.

While the industry considers more logical abstractions to further loosen the ties between business processes and physical infrastructure, IT management needs to assure ongoing application availability and performance in virtual and cloud deployments with a high rate of data growth. IT needs solutions that provide a complete picture of data center health across compute, network, and storage.

The just-announced EMC Storage Resource Management Suite provides service assurance from application-to-storage by monitoring and reporting on availability, performance, and compliance. It combines EMC storage management and analysis with technologies from the recent Watch4net acquisition to ensure application consistency in dynamic data centers. Continue reading →

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Performance Management In A Cross-Domain World

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How do you ensure performance across your virtualized data center or cloud?

There is much emphasis on enterprise management tools being able to assure the availability of IT delivered services from a centralized event console.  You can search the Web and find many solutions that claim they can consolidate events into one single dashboard. However, availability is only part of the story when it comes to building an application-aware infrastructure to deliver always-on business services with better-than-expected service levels. A central management point for performance across all domains is essential in assuring delivery of business services to customers. 

Recent posts here have addressed how Web design models such as REST are setting the stage for standing up new services more quickly and providing some semblance of portability across private, public, and hybrid clouds. Standing on the brink of delivering on the promise of cloud computing, organizations need to ensure both the availability—and performance—of business-critical applications as they move to non-traditional deployments that still support demanding customers mostly disinterested in how computing gets done. Continue reading →

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Carriers And Clouds

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How do the tier-1 telecommunications carriers fit into cloud?

The large telecommunication service providers or carriers might seem well-positioned to provide and benefit from the cloud computing model. The tier-1 carriers (e.g. AT&T, France Telecom, NTT Docomo, Vodafone) have the infrastructure, enterprise customer base, and the geographic reach to provide cloud services over great distances. Additionally, they are well-versed in multi-tenancy; all I have to do is look at my monthly communications bill to get a glimpse in the detailed reporting of my mobile roaming and texting use.

However, though in a good position, these carriers need to add new proficiencies to their core competencies to meet the demands of the different size organizations that comprise their potential customer base for cloud computing services.  Much like the late 1990s when deregulation in the telecommunications industry and the shift of voice services to the Internet and the emergence of new data services, carriers need to navigate the changes to offset declining revenues in some of their traditional services with new cloud-based offerings. Continue reading →

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Cloud Architectures Are Not New

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Well, if cloud architectures are not new, exactly how old are they? The title almost begs the question.

It may be the latest, hottest buzzword, but architecturally, the cloud is more than 20 years old.  And, you are intimately familiar with it. It’s the Web. What makes it “the cloud” are the enterprise applications getting moved onto the Web.  But, this move isn’t just a matter of deploying some application servers and offering HTTP-based interfaces to existing software. It is a marked change with the architecture of these software systems built on and for the Web, rather than for traditional enterprise infrastructure.

A key tenet that makes enterprise application deployment in the cloud possible over the Web is REST. Having emerged over the past few years as a predominant Web service design model, REST has increasingly displaced other design models such as SOAP because of its simpler style. Joining me in the development of this blog post to be published when I’m on vacation is EMC senior technologist Cornelia Davis. Continue reading →