Cloud Crashes: Just One Villain!

June 5, 2011

The article “Cloud Outages: Why Storage Is the Real Villain” surprised me. My understanding of the high profile cloud problems is that there were different types of problems. Some of these were external such as Sony’s inability to keep hackers from penetrating the once proud manufacturer of the Walkman.

Amazon had intraprocess issues. Google’s Blogger went south due to a process issue. The recent Gmail problem is, according to probably specious news reports, China. (Google blames China, which is okay, just a bit repetitious in my view.) Microsoft Exchange did those wild and wonderful Windows ME sorts of things just in Microsoft hosted services, not on my neighbor’s computer.

Here is the passage that caught my attention in the ZDNet write up:

But first and foremost, we have to recognize that the real issues with storage-as-a-service are caused by inadequacies in storage technology, not by the concept itself. We have to address those problems rather than lay responsibility at the feet of cloud computing.

I agree that since Amazon Web Service’s flamed out in April 2011, the cloud looks less like a solution and more like YAP (yet another problem).

Considering the number of companies which are testing and using “cloud computing”, these issues may give some customers a sleepless night or two.

When I worked through the ZDNet write up, I was interested in boiling down some quite different problems to storage. Sure, storage is an issue and it may have been the problem at Amazon. However, the article casts a wider net and catches a whopper, letting the other and tastier fish slip through the weave in the logic. I

If anything, we should be examining the current model of cloud computing more, not less. Tightening the logic net around cloud computing seems like a reasonable step. If one is looking for information, and the cloud based enterprise search system fails, what then? Storage is not the problem, is it?

Stephen E Arnold, June 5, 2011

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Cloud computing, News, Search, Technology

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.