Posted by: Brent Martin
in Cloud Computing on Aug 15, 2010
Remember the old days (circa 2006) when doing disaster recovery involved shipping tapes to an off-site storage facility and provisioning emergency hardware at a disaster recovery facility? Well, fast forward to 2010 when virtually unlimited hardware and disk storage are cheap and plentiful. Making real-time backups to the cloud (with the right software) is not only doable but almost a no-brainer. But once your backup is in the cloud, the next logical step would be to launch a virtual instance of the server that you backed up. But that’s like, Star Trek futuristic stuff, right?
Well no more. CloudRepica has a Software as a Service offering that does just that. Their enterprise-grade replication software is capable of creating real-time disk images of any server. Then they combine that with the unlimited disk resources and phenomenal reliability of the cloud to create a real-time disk backup and recovery service. This offering is packaged and delivered in a Software as a Service model where you pay only a monthly fee. There are no upfront costs, no licenses, no hardware, no media, no consulting labor and no facilities costs.
Posted by: Brent Martin
in Cloud Computing on Jun 09, 2010
Sure, Amazon Web Services is great for geeks and small companies with nothing to lose, but what if your company is in the Fortune 1000? Can you really trust Amazon (or any cloud provider for that matter) with your employees, vendors, customers, and all of the associated confidential data like credit card numbers and tax ID’s?
That’s something I’ve been struggling with lately. We have successfully used AWS to spin up demo environments of PeopleSoft Enterprise, Hyperion, GoldenGate. We used demo data as opposed to any customer-specific data which has been fine so far. And I must say that AWS is an incredible tool to get the software up and running and build a sandbox for evaluation purposes. But the next logical step would be to use AWS to host conference room pilot and prototyping environments to support our initial requirements gathering efforts. Beyond that we’ll want to build Dev and Test environments. And all of these environments will need real data from existing systems.
We can certainly procure the hardware and host these environments in house, but I’m thinking about AWS because we could postpone our hardware purchases until closer to the end of the requirements gathering phase when we can be more precise about our needs. So I did some research and here are some of the things I’ve learned.
