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…