by Angela Guess
Charles Babcock recently looked at the trends surrounding data centers and asked the question, “What do you get when you marry cloud data centers to a telecommunications company? My answer is: the beginnings of a cloud network, a chain of linked data centers that in some cases bring two or more data centers into a position of backing each other up. That’s something many enterprises would value as they move workloads into the cloud. The service freeze in Amazon Web Services’ northern Virginia center over the Easter weekend served as a reminder of the value of geographic distribution when it comes to backup and recovery.”
Babcock continues, “I hope Amazon Web Services is studying the trend. If you were an AWS customer in US East-1 (northern Va.), you couldn’t easily designate the AWS data center in Dublin as your preferred failover site. You couldn’t even select AWS’ US West data center, unless you constructed the network links to it yourself. You were stuck using a neighboring Amazon “availability zone,” which, it turns out April 22-24, was not necessarily in a separate data center and in some cases froze up at the same time as your primary zone did. Automated backup to a separate location, however, is a definite possibility, given linked chains in the cloud.”
photo credit: Double–M (formerly DoubleM2)
