Posted 10/19/08 at 08:59:08 PM by Justin Kerr

A Google Apps malfunction was reported on Thursday leaving education edition users without access to various services, including Gmail. It turns out the loss of access was tied to an unannounced change in the layouts of start pages which redirected to a non functional iGoogle address. Google spokesmen Andrew Kovacs stated that "this was an isolated bug".  "I don't want to minimize this, but was this an issue where people could not access their data? No."  Google hasn’t publically stated how many of the over one million businesses and 10 million users were impacted by the bug, but apparently it was only reported by a handful of users.  Kovacs went on to state that "Basically, the broader perspective with an approach to communication is to be transparent. With these hosted applications we are held to a higher standard since we are so transparent with our communication." This made me wonder. With all the negative back lash companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon receive when cloud services crash, is all the bad press really fair? Do we really have the right to expect 100% uptime?

Hit the jump and let us know what you think.

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Posted 10/06/08 at 04:35:24 PM by Andy Salisbury

Last Friday the world’s largest computing grid was launched in order to help tackle the nearly 15 million gigabytes of data that will be coming out of the Large Hadron Collider every year. 33 countries are already contributing 140 computer centers to the project, but with that much data, they’ll need worldwide assistance.

Here in the U.S. we’ve got 15 universities and three Department of Energy national laboratories contributing their power to the project (and maybe you, if you’ve decided to contribute your spare CPU cycles to the project). And every last bit of that help will be needed, because when the LHC finally gets up to full speed it will produce enough data to fill six CD’s per second.

Once the data has been processed, physicists from around the world will begin searching for he tiny signals that will lead them to discoveries about the nature of the physical universe. And perhaps then, they’ll be able to explain just why they LHC will rock us in the head.

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Posted 07/08/08 at 06:13:51 PM by Benson Hong

The idea of being able to store and access company data from a remote datacenter may sound splendid for the IT department, but lets not get our heads in the clouds just yet. Cloud computing has made a strong push in the past year with help from Amazon, IBM, and Sun offering virtual servers for remote use, but regardless of the push large corporations just aren’t ready for the switch and Gigaom.com gives you the 10 reasons why.

According to the article, the number one concern companies should have is security. Cloud computing will need to toughen up its defense against information leaks before companies can feel safe with keeping all their sensitive terabyles online. Data leaving company doors would leave it vulnerable to thousands of ambitious hackers constantly trying to sneak their way into corporate information. Proofpoint, the makers of data encryption software, has released a survey reporting that “44% of surveyed companies reported that they investigated an email leak of confidential information in the past 12 months” with the emails coming from their own employees. With companies already having trouble keeping data safe within their own infrastructures, the security fears of someone else keeping all of your information are probably warranted.

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