Cloud News

• Cloud failures may have cost upward of $70 million since 2007, according to this PCWorld article. The International Working Group on Cloud Resiliency (IWGCR) revealed that cloud outages of 13 well-known cloud services in the last five years resulted in an availability rate of 99.9% which is well below the expected reliability rate for mission-critical applications, which should be 99.999%.

• The Researchers at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva recently revealed that European data protection laws are hindering them from adopting cloud computing on a significant scale, according to this ComputerWorld article. CERN revealed that only a fraction of the data it collects from the Large Hadron Collider accelerator, which generates about a petabyte of raw data per second, is stored.

• Gartner released a list of the top 10 emerging infrastructure trends for 2012, according to this InfoWorld article. The list includes consumerization and the tablet, infinite data center, resource management, mobility and the personal cloud, hybrid clouds, fabric data centers, IT complexity, storage and big data, end of your service help desk and software-defined networks virtualizing the data center.

• Amazon EC2 suffered a major outage last week at their largest data center, which brought down some popular websites including Quora, Hipchat, and Heroku, according to this ZDNet blog. The outage was due to a power failure and subsequent generator failure.

• Eucalyptus announced updates to its cloud platform to add new features for rapid deployment and to remove the distinction between their open source and enterprise versions, according to this CloudPro article. The platform will now be fully open source and the source code will be available through Github.