Links List 8.21.09

August 21st, 2009 by Valerie Barber

The anticipated spreading of the H1N1 virus has us all planning for an unpredictable flu season. How can IT departments keep running when faced with sustained and rolling absenteeism among staff? Some tips: have a businesss continuity plan, develop a contingency plan – including hiring retired employees – should your IT department shrink by 20% or more, and identify and address IT component failure points in case engineers are unavailable to resolve issues. Experts also advise businesses to develop and communicate to employees its plans for working remotely, if an outbreak occurs.

The Open Group, a vendor-neutral consortium that promotes open standards and interoperability for enterprise technology, is forming The Cloud Work Group, a new committee to develop a common understanding about how enterprise cloud services should be deployed. The committee includes vendors and end-user organizations, including US and UK government officials and aims  to  uniquely  focus on enterprise requirements rather than the nitty-gritty technology details. “The last thing this industry needs is more competing and contradictory information on emerging technologies like cloud computing,” says Dave Lounsbury, the Open Group’s vice president of collaboration services. Dave, we’re rooting for you to add some clarity and specifics instead of just more high-level noise around the cloud.

Two-thirds of recently surveyed C-level hardware and software executives indicated that they believe the technology sector will recover from the economic crisis more quickly than the overall US economy. The findings appear to mirror recent earnings reports in the technology sector that conditions are improving.

Software developers believe that developing apps to run on private clouds will become one of their main tasks over the coming year. Almost 30% of developers surveyed said they are currently working on apps for private cloud environments with another 19% expecting to start cloud development within the next 12 months. Great numbers but perhaps still more like dipping your toe in the pond – half of the developers surveyed using EC2 are still doing so experimentally or for prototyping an application, not to run a business critical application.

Dave Rosenberg tells early adopters of cloud computing – infrastructure-as-a-service to beware. Researchers in Australia stress tested cloud computing services of Google AppEngine, Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure and found regular performance and availability issues. All platform testing results were at best mixed, and at worst ”severely dynfunctional”. Anna Liu, associate professor in services engineering at the University of New South Wales School of Computer Science (responsible for the study) had this to say about cloud performance monitoring (or the lack thereof):

None of the platforms have the kind of monitoring required to have a reasonable conversation about performance…They provide some level of monitoring, but what little there is caters for developers, not business users.

Sounds like a job for EM7 G3…

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