Boeing turn Azure, Cloud in a corner?, HP launch Cloud, Google and Microsoft see downtime.

Hello all,

The wind is blowing and the sky is grey, so let’s inject a little sparkle into our lives with some Cloud News! Or summat…

1. Boeing have launched “737 Explained”, a virtual tour of the magic metal bird which used Azure – and a bunch of Microsoft’s other goodies – to and I quote “… show prospective customers the new features and improvements without bringing them to an airport.”. I like this, it shows solid use of Platform services to deliver useful tools to business. You can see the systems in action at http://www.newairplane.com/737/explained/
2. Is “Cloud in a corner” syndrome affecting your enterprise IT? Unisys have put out some advice to CIOs warning of the signs that they could be suffering from Cloud in a Corner syndrome and advises that proper strategic integration planning is the best way to avoid such a thing. Of course this is about using THEM to do such strategic planning but the advice and the telltale signs they’ve given are still pretty sound and I’ve always advised organisations – both service providers AND consumers to make sure that the overall strategy is in place before any evaluation of new tech is considered and there are good organisations out there who can help. PR at Marketwatch http://bit.ly/qBUz9Z
3. Last time it was DELL, this time it’s HP who are announcing their own Cloud Services solutions, those being a Compute and a Storage service. The services are built on OpenStack but HP have added a lot of their own code to the mix too. Will they succeed? Time alone will tell as the IaaS market is getting pretty busy and they’ll need to have something of value to offer as well as the big brand. Gigaom ran the story: http://bit.ly/nAB8YO
4. A Google docs outage last week was caused by an update to the systems and was, apparently, mitigated through adding more servers and RAM and undoing the update. It looks like the outage lasted for about an hour, but that’s been enough for some observers to re-state the need for some kind of off-line working to be available. http://bit.ly/n2gSJY
5. Well, I wanted some Microsoft news, but this really wasn’t what I had in mind. Another outage for a raft of services including Hotmail, SkyDrive, CRM and others,  was due to DNS issues, or so we believe. I keep trying to be positive about learning curves and that kind of thing, but DNS is fairly fundamental and to get that wrong or messed up is a little disappointing. The best article I’ve seen covering this was a piece by the BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14851455

That’s all from me for this week, so until next time… Onwards and upwards everyone!