This week, cloud operator Joyent learned a humbling lesson in data center management when an admin's mistake caused the company a major data outage. But it wasn't all bad news this week. Sony took the storage industry by storm with its record-breaking cassette tape that holds nearly 200 TB of data. These stories and more in this week's roundup:
Whoops! One Small Mistake Causes Major Outage
Cloud operator Joyent experienced a major outage on Tuesday after an administrator's error took down the entire data center. No customer data was lost, and the company resolved the problem within the hour. "For those not familiar with the cloud, a datacenter-wide forced reboot on all servers is just about the worst thing that can happen to a provider aside from the deletion of customer data, or multiple data centers going down simultaneously," writes The Register. According to Joyent's postmortem investigation, the incident occurred when an admin used a tool to remotely update software on new servers in the data center and inadvertently caused all of the servers in the data center to reboot. To find out more, check out Joyent's recap post on its blog.
Read more at The Register
Cloud Computing: A Disaster Recovery Game-Changer
Before the cloud, data disaster recovery relied on backing up company data to either a tape or disk. "There are clear drawbacks to this method," writes Daniel Price for CloudTweaks. "Setting it up can be complex and it may be difficult to recover entire distributed, multi-tier, multi-site workloads. Furthermore, disks are not easily scalable, are not easily portable, and are not necessarily secure." The cloud allows companies to use virtualization to backup — and not just files, but the entire operating system, applications, patches and other data. Additionally, according to a recent infographic from CloudTweaks, 33 percent of data is lost due to IT equipment failure and whopping 48 percent to human error.
Read more at Cloud Tweaks
Top Scientists Rely on the Cloud for Data Storage
The search for massive black holes, the origin of cosmic magnetic fields and the history of the universe generates a lot of data. In the next decade, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) — a network of 2,000 radio dishes — will begin collecting data for scientists to analyze and uncover new information about the universe. To do this, access to cloud systems for data storage is vital, says SKA architect Tim Cornwell of the Jodrell Bank Observatory near Manchester, UK. According to Cornwell, the cloud systems will provide easy and elastic access to shared, remote digital resources and provide flexibility that hardware storage can't match.
Read more at Nature
Sony Breaks Storage Record with 185 TB Cassette
This week, Sony broke the record for data storage with a 185 TB cassette tape. According to CIO Today, "At that much capacity, Sony's new tapes hold the equivalent of 11,840 16 gigabytes iPhone 5s devices — or about 3,700 Blu-ray discs." In a statement, Sony explained, "The expansion of cloud services and the creation of new markets to utilize big data have led to a growing need for a data storage media which can store large amounts of information." Tape storage is slower to access than flash drives or even smartphone storage, but it could mean enhanced enterprise storage capabilities on tape in the future.
Read more at CIO Today
Image via Astronomynow
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