Virtualisation and availability podcast alert

09Mar10

Tune in to The Register’s next webcast in its virtualisation series: Virtualisation and Security: Practical Matters on Wednesday 10th, 10am. Exploring whether virtualisation makes security considerations easier to address, The Register’s Tim Phillip will  steer subject matter experts  Neil Sanderson (Microsoft) and Tony Lock (Freeform Dynamics) into providing some kind of definitive answers, depending, of course,  on the questions we throw at them.

Exploring:

  • Security is all about context
  • How does virtualisation affect security?
  • What could go wrong?
  • What are the options?
  • Securing systems
  • High availability/ systems recovery
  • Data and virtual machine backup and recovery challenges
  • Software licensing
  • Security and VDI

Expect me to pitch in around the availability piece…

Come on, join me. Let’s help them to make this real.


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Survey reveals increased downtime risk, suggesting ultra high availability’s time has come…

05Mar10

Whilst this week’s RSA conference claims security is the thorn in cloud computing’s side, a recent Stratus Technologies and ITIC survey of 650 IT professionals in 18 countries underscores how the cloud is increasing the need for highly available server platforms.

Whilst, according to Microsoft’s Scott Charney  “There’s no such thing as 100% security unfortunately, either in the physical world or in the electronic world”, there is, fortunately, such a thing as 99.9999% guaranteed uptime in the electronic world (if not the physical.) Is ultra high availability about to come of age?

According to the Stratus/ ITIC research twenty-five percent of respondents intended to upgrade a significant portion of server hardware within 12-18 months in support of virtualisation and, further out, cloud-computing initiatives. This route exposes businesses to increased downtime (and associated security) risk. By its very nature, placing more applications on fewer servers, virtualisation burdens the underlying hardware. Ensuring uptime reliability, especially in light of executive expectations, has never been so important; raising awareness of levels of uptime reliability never more timely. I suggest that ultra high availability’s time has come.


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ROUND UP

25Feb10

Times are busy, so for today’s post, I thought I’d help some of you who are equally as busy by proving a quick round up of recent developments in the interconnected worlds of availability and cloud computing…

Great to read that heading up cloud software vendor OpSource’s list of customer concerns in a recent survey are reliability and accountability. SLAs guaranteeing 100% uptime is cited as extremely important by 74% of respondents with 24/7 support also deemed essential.

An interesting VC perspective here, categorising the players in Cloud land and predicting huge growth for VMWare . Particularly interesting as the publication is sponsored by VMware…

HP announces that it is helping enterprise architect Cloud environments, with Alan Wilson, vice president of Solutions Infrastructure Practice at HP stating: “Organisations of all types are struggling to understand how to build a cloud-specific infrastructure that is safe and effective while meeting business objectives.”

“No matter what path companies want to take to adopt cloud, HP offers a comprehensive set of services that covers complex and heterogeneous environments to help organisations maximise the business benefits,” adds IDC analyst Gard Little.

Hope they’ve got the 100% guaranteed uptime and the 24/7 support customers are citing as so important sussed then, otherwise they may end up in good company with Microsoft (whose Windows Live suffered temporary outage last week due to a dead server); with egg on their face…




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Super Computers: Too Big to Fail?

23Feb10

“Just beware the shiny new servers with outrageous resources. You may ultimately create a monster that is literally too big to fail,” concludes Mark Vaughn in his recent column High-performance computers: Too much of a good thing? in SearchServerVitualization .

This article was music to my ears. Mark Vaughn has got it spot on when he suggests that some of the great new high performance computers (e.g. blade servers with unimaginable amounts of memory and disk capacity in tiny footprints) may not actually be the best for your virtualised infrastructure. This is the concern I have always had with what I refer to as “aggressive” consolidations.  I get the message that you will be saving money, cooling and it’s ultra flexible. But, when that super server has a problem, VMs will fail and I was interested in the author’s suggestion of a domino effect – something I hadn’t considered before but that is entirely possible, if not probable.

All is not lost though! Just substitute those super servers with fault tolerant technology. That way, if there is a problem, the server carries on running, albeit in simplex (think of it as limp-home without any loss of performance or functionality) mode. Services can then be live migrated onto other existing nodes and, hey presto, no downtime!


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Keeping it REAL

19Feb10

MaximumASP’s Stacy Griggs paints an interesting picture of how to guarantee your website never goes down in his WHIR post last week.

He describes the pros and cons of 4 and 5 nine guaranteed redundancy well. Personally I prefer to view it as guaranteed uptime, or fault tolerance, and respectfully bring to readers’ attention to the recent possibility of 6 nine (99.9999%) uptime made real by fifth generation ftServers.

One reader questions the reality of 100% uptime. I advise that it really is not too far away and commend Stacy on a good post which scores highly on my usefulness and accuracy scales, regardless of the oversight in mentioning fault tolerance and the new 6 nines level of availability.

I encourage you to learn more about what it takes to achieve REAL fault tolerance by clicking the image below:


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Uptime: King of The Cloud

11Feb10

Cloud computing is no longer some obscure concept, fit only for cocktail banter at Silicon Valley parties, according to The Motley Crew. Gartner, CDW and many others concur. Yet news headlines regularly tell us of the cloud crashing. Have these experts got it right? Is it really time to get in with the Cloud Crowd?

OK, so I’ve been as guilty as anyone of informing you of relevant web sites and services crashing and of warning against the impact of downtime on the country in view of the government’s 2014 plans. However, it seems the world and his blog are ready for the cloud to finally deliver its promise this year.

If you’re thinking the time is right to get in with the Crowd Cloud, my advice is …. do. Be sure, though, to select a provider whose SLA guarantees uptime. Uptime is king of the cloud. Be aware that it’s not just the huge public cloud providers whose services regularly crash. Private cloud providers do too.

Indeed, the SLAs of many private cloud providers are full of holes . This being so, it’s worth knowing about the API Status website which helps you to keep an eye on 26 popular APIs,  including those provided by Digg, Bit.ly, Amazon, Bing. Flickr, Amazon and (of course) Twitter.

The site makes it very easy to learn exactly when any of these APIs goes down, and to arrive at conclusive overall figures. Also, it will let you figure out if any difficulty that you are experiencing is a global one, or if it is only your desktop playing tricks on you.

Whether you’re talking  private or internal cloud – internal being inside the enterprise firewall – delivering the services promised is what matters: users need to have total confidence that they can get to their data whenever they need it. All crowd providers claim to offer such ‘always on’ service.

The truth is that many have infrastructure choke points where, if a server fails, service delivery is interrupted. It is those choke points where continuously available servers are uniquely capable of ensuring delivery of cloud services.

So, sure, the cloud is the place to be in 2010. Check out whether your provider hosts on a continuously available server before picking which one to hop onto though…



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Off the shelf HA discussion Worth Tuning Into

09Feb10

In this article, RTC Magazine reports that the high availability (HA) systems market is moving rapidly from an in-house proprietary systems approach to a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) direction, making such solutions available to a wider range of applications. In comparing the two alternatives, it is driving quite a lot of comment.

One comment is from my colleague Dara Ambrose. Dara points out that another important factor to consider when implementing a HA solution is the cost of validating that it can withstand faults and continue to perform as expected.

In his comment he explains why pushing as much of the HA solution into COTS components as possible, can greatly reduce this investment.


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Is Active Active Worth it?

20Jan10

A great article on whether the cost of converting to Active Active is worth it in Availability Digest last month. Well worth reading.

Active Active is an architecture where two nodes transact and keep themselves up-to-date. Well, that’s the theory anyway. A device or user sends a “transaction” to one of the nodes and if it doesn’t get a response then the request is sent again to the other node, which, ideally, is situated somewhere else, geographically.

The author has done a good job of discussing the costs associated with altering code etc to make it all work. The interesting phrase, of course, is “……..virtually eliminating……..downtime”.

If the nodes contain any form or database (e.g. an account balance in a credit card or ATM type system), then it is possible that the balance on one node is different from the other. This brings the challenge of trying to work out which one is correct. This is called “split brain syndrome”. It’s a ‘mare’ to put right.

Imagine you go to an cashmachine to withdraw some money. The request fires off to NODE-1. NODE-1 updates your account balance then the instruction goes back to the ATM to dispense your money. On the way there is a failure.Now, the ATM knows it hasn’t got a response so requests the same (after a suitable timeout) of NODE-2.

At this stage no one knows whether NODE-2 has the old or the new balance. If you originally requested £100 and you had a balance of £1000, then the new balance should be £900.The ATM requests £100 again so you now have a balance of £800 but you have only got £100 out! Think what happens if your balance was only £100 in the first place. No money!

The alternative Scenario is NODE-1 gives you the money then dies before NODE-2 is updated. Then if you go to the ATM again, the ATM fires a request off to NODE-B and the original account balance of £1000 is still there. Then you can get a second lot of £100 out (so now you have £200) but the account balance has only been debited by £100. Bingo!

In the example above, I concede that I am over simplifying what happens and the checks and balances that go on between the devices – but if you probe various vendors who have architected active/active type solutions, there is evidence to suggest that the above can happen. My verdict?

Active/Active is great for planned downtime (shift all transactions to one of the nodes whilst the other goes into maintenance mode) and as an ‘in-place’ automatic data recovery facility. For ultra high availability in the first instance though, use Fault Tolerant technology!


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High Availability in the Decade to Come

14Jan10

Having made my predictions for the year to come before the recent inclement weather, I’ve been doing a bit of thinking. I wanted to join other pundits in making my forecast for the decade. Yet, since most people can’t even decide what to call the decade, and since I myself keep failing to cross the first hurdle (believing that the infrastructure to make anything positive happen will be in place) I’ve decided not to.

Instead this post is a friendly reminder of what seems to be becoming my mantra: only an ultra high availability infrastructure will ensure that the expected service levels of the new decade are met…

I guess the inclement weather has taught all of us a thing or two over the last few weeks. It may have been the worst for the last 30 years, but it still amazes me how much disruption a natural event is causing.

I remember family stories (the good old days when grandfathers had to walk to work) where the snow was so high, you found yourself walking over hedges, ending up in the middle of a field and not realising where you were (or perhaps the beer was stronger back then).

I admit it has been pretty cold – the car thermometer said -11 where I live yesterday, but I remember -18 as short a while ago as 1995.

Since making my predictions last year, these allegedly extreme conditions have affected me in many ways: flights delayed/cancelled; roads closed; a power cut; my bank deciding to shut all my accounts in error. Connecting all of this is a common theme: the fragility of our infrastructure.

Link this fragility to aggressive “efficiencies” that have been put in place by various organisations due to extreme conditions and it is beyond fragile. It’s broken.

Technology can help people during times of extreme weather. We can fall back on “technology” to, for example, research information on the weather/flights/roads and to work, bank and shop  from home. Often, however, service providers’ IT infrastructures simply can’t take the strain.

Visitors to National Rail Enquiries, the Highway Agency and the RAC’s web sites, for example, found this out last week, according to the Daily Telegraph.

If, in this day and age, snow can still cause havoc for travel websites, then I fear for the government’s plans for 2014 becoming a reality and am certainly not prepared to commit my predictions for the new decade to media, just in case they come true.

I am, however, interested in hearing yours, so come on, what do you want the new decade’s availability story to be? Let’s get some discussion going…


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High Availability Vital to Gordon Brown’s 2014 Vision

07Jan10

This week’s anti-Brown activities got me to thinking about Gordon’s   announcement at the end of last year regarding the need to ensure all public services are online by 2014. Putting the Frontline First, as the report which launched this initiative is called, makes sense, but only if a an infrastructure is in place that can guarantee excellent customer satisfaction.

The Putting the Frontline First report explains how, if all services are put online, the government hopes service will be improved and staff will be freer to deal with individuals.

When launching the report, Gordon said that within the next five years the government will shift the great majority of its “large transactional services to become online only”. Doing so, he hopes, will bring £3 billion additional savings to the £9 billion savings outlined in this year’s budget.

I look forward to finding out more from the Digital Britain Roadmap due at the end of 2010. The roadmap, apparently, will explain how services such as job seekers allowance, student loans and child tax credits will be making the move online.

Such important public services preparing to move online by 2014, does of course put high availability at the frontline. The knock on effect of failing to deliver less than 99.999% availability will be catastrophic, as the Department of Labour and Industry in the US discovered last month when its unemployment web site for the Pennsylvanian district went down, causing difficulties for people filing unemployment claims.

According to WNEP, those visiting the site were greeted with a message telling them that the online filing system “is operating intermittently”. This purpose of the site is to help claimants file for unemployment compensation services in Pennsylvania. The technical problem with the online system meant that many who were trying to file claims were understandably concerned and tried to get in contact via telephone to make sure they received their benefits.

As a result, further problems were created for the phone system because of the high numbers of calls being received from people who were worried their unemployment cheques would not be sent. Those who could not get through due to the high volume of calls had to wait until after 5pm and call again. Such downtime could result  in benefits not being paid on time and vulnerable people suffering severe hardships, their lives even potentially put at risk, due to circumstances beyond their control.

It’s easy to imagine similar scenarios for other governmental departments : imagine going to buy your car tax and the system is down, meaning you’re driving or keeping a car on the roadside illegally and it’s not your fault.

Of course, we don’t need to imagine what would happen in the student loan scenario, we’ve already seen some people having to give up university this year due to the current chaos.

Putting The Frontline First makes sense — but only if the infrastructure is in place.


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