AWS Has Taught Us about Fragile Cloud Architectures

The recent Amazon Web Services Simple Storage Service (S3) outage has taught us quite a bit about fragile cloud architectures. While many cloud providers will make hay during the next few weeks, current cloud architectures are fragile. Modern hybrid cloud architectures are fragile. We need to learn from this outage to design better systems: ones …

Virtualization Vendors 4th Quarter Results

In February, several of the top virtualization vendor companies released their fourth quarter results and guidance. From this release, we should be able to get an understanding of how the companies are performing. VMware, Citrix, and Red Hat are the companies for whichI have some data to share. The source of the revenue reports is Cleveland Research Company, and the sources of the individual company reports are CRC and FactSet Estimates.

Cloud: The Great Disaggregated Everything

As I’ve thought about how to implement high-performance, very large-scale networks within a secure hybrid cloud, I have come to the conclusion that the cloud works best with disaggregated network functions. This is the goal of network function virtualization, or NFV, but the real problem is knowing what functions to virtualize and how to do …

Disaster Recovery as a Service Requirements

In our data protection research, we have discovered that there are quite a number of companies that say they do Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). Just what is DRaaS? What are the basic requirements? Is using a public cloud better than using hosted DRaaS? Are there any risks? Is DRaaS just a dump-and-go? Is …