Will Congress crush tech spending?
The failure of the Congressional Super Committee to reach a deficit reduction agreement triggers automatic federal spending cuts beginning the next fiscal year, which will likely make a lot of government IT contractors nervous.
Beginning in fiscal 2013, the government will have to cut $1.2 trillion over 10 years under a process called "sequestration."
The first indications of how those cuts may impact federal tech spending may appear in the first federal budget proposals expected in February. The impact of the cuts on tech companies may be mixed, say analysts.
Ray Bjorklund, chief knowledge office at Deltek (formerly Federal Sources), believes that federal IT spending will still rise one or two percent in the next budget. Read more...
Web 2.0 Summit to focus on value, pitfalls of online data
This year's Web 2.0 Summit will focus on the critical role that online data plays in the Internet economy and on how its use and misuse can make the difference between success and failure in markets like online gaming, Web advertising, search, social media, and mobile.
The CEOs of Intel, Microsoft, eBay, Salesforce.com, Twitter, and Dell, along with officials from Facebook, IBM, Google, and LinkedIn, will be among the speakers at the conference, an influential and select gathering of 1,000 executives, entrepreneurs, and investors.
O'Reilly Media's Web 2.0 Summit, which runs from Monday through Wednesday in San Francisco, will identify best practices for leveraging online data and pinpoint pitfalls and challenges related to its use, such as privacy concerns.
Susan Etlinger, an Altimeter Group analyst who plans to attend the conference, said organizers chose an important and timely topic to explore. Read more...
Dear Microsoft: When your cloud goes down, keep users informed
Microsoft still doesn't get it. Tuesday, Arthur de Haan, VP of Windows Live Test and Service Engineering, posted an analysis of the Sept. 8 outage that took down most of Microsoft's cloud applications. On the Windows Team Blog he explains:
[W]e have identified two streams of work to drive specific service improvements around monitoring, problem identification, and recovery. Along with these service improvements, Microsoft is focused on further hardening the DNS service to improve its overall redundancy and fail-over capability... [and] an additional recovery process that will allow a specific property the ability to fail over to restore service and then fail back when the DNS service is restored. In addition, we are reviewing the recovery tools to see if we can make more improvements that will decrease the time it takes to resolve outages. Read more...
Data center systems run in exposed shed to prove reliability point
In an experiment that began in January, servers, networking gear, and storage systems have been running in an simple shed without failure.
This experiment is giving David Filas, a data center engineer at the healthcare provider Trinity Health, the ammunition he needs to argue that IT equipment is a lot tougher than most think.
Through winter, spring, and summer, these decommissioned systems keep running despite big variations in temperate and humidity. And the uptime of the systems has been better than what Google and Amazon have delivered so far this year.
Filas wants to convince IT administrators at his company, which runs 47 hospitals and other health care facilities, that it's OK to raise the temperature in data centers. But the IT staff has been reluctant to do so, he says. Read more...
Lightning strike in Dublin downs Amazon, Microsoft clouds
A lightning strike in Dublin on Sunday caused a power failure in data centers belonging to Amazon and Microsoft, causing the companies' cloud services to go offline.
lightning struck a transformer, sparking an explosion and fire which caused the power outage at 10:41 AM PDT, according to preliminary information, Amazon wrote on its Service Health Dashboard. Under normal circumstances, backup generators would seamlessly kick in, but the explosion also managed to knock out some of those generators.
By 1:56 PM PDT, power to the majority of network devices had been restored, allowing Amazon to focus on bringing EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances and EBS (Elastic Block Storage) volumes back online. But progress was slower than expected, Amazon said a couple of hours later. Read more...