Condusiv: MS Data Center Outage Highlights Need for File Recovery Tools
A recent power outage at a Microsoft data center created problems for users in the U.S. and abroad. IT executives and departments should be equipped to restore deleted and overwritten files in virtual as well as local and network storage.
GLENDALE, Calif., Sept. 17, 2018 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- In early September, a lightning strike near one of Microsoft's data centers in San Antonio, TX, caused a power surge. This resulted in a power-down when cooling equipment failed, triggering an outage of the Azure cloud computing platform in the region and issues with Office 365 globally.1 During the several-hour outage, Microsoft users in the South Central U.S. were unable to access Application Insights, the Azure App Service, web and mobile apps, the Azure Cosmos DB (database), and the IoT hub.2 "This incident," says James D'Arezzo, CEO of Condusiv Technologies, "is a clear reminder of the need for all organizations—including users of cloud-based services—to maintain their own redundancy and recovery capabilities."
D'Arezzo, whose company is a world leader in I/O reduction and SQL database performance, notes that this capability is becoming more important as organizations increasingly rely on the combination of big data analytics and cloud-based computing. According to MicroStrategy's 2018 Global State of Analytics Report, based on a survey of 500 enterprise analytics professionals across 20 industries and five nations, 71% of enterprises globally predict that their investment in data and analytics will accelerate between now and the early 2020s. Forty-one percent of all enterprises are considering a move to cloud-based analytics within the next year.3
The elasticity of the Cloud, as well as its economics, make it particularly well-suited for big-data analytics. At the same time, industry observers comment that the Cloud's distributed nature can be problematic for big data analysis. "If you're running Hadoop clusters and things like that," says a co-founder of Zurich-based infrastructure-as-a-service provider CloudSigma, "they put a really heavy load on storage, and in most clouds, the performance of the storage isn't good enough." Cloud service providers note that storage performance in a highly virtualized, distributed cloud can be tricky on its own, and that the demands of big data analysis only magnify the issue.4
Condusiv believes that the potential for data error due to these performance issues is one of the routine risks of doing business in today's environment, along with events such as the recent Microsoft data center outage. D'Arezzo points out that "This incident comes as a forceful and necessary reminder that no data center is completely fail-safe. It's incumbent upon IT executives to ensure that they have every tool available to quickly recover mission-critical files in the event of an outage."
He adds that the toolbox should contain not only the snapshots and backups necessary to recover entire lost data sets, but fast precision tools that can recover lost files without having to go to backup media. Condusiv's Undelete® enables quick recovery of deleted or overwritten local and network files and can instantly recover files in virtual environments. Users can easily restore their own deleted and overwritten files, with no need to involve the IT department.
About Condusiv® Technologies
Condusiv Technologies is the world leader in software-only storage performance solutions for virtual and physical server environments, enabling systems to process more data in less time for faster application performance. Condusiv guarantees to solve the toughest application performance challenges with faster-than-new performance via V-locity® for virtual servers and Diskeeper® or SSDkeeper® for physical servers and PCs. With over 100 million licenses sold, Condusiv solutions are used by 90% of Fortune 1000 companies and almost three-quarters of Forbes Global 100 companies to increase business productivity and reduce data center costs while extending the life of existing hardware. Condusiv CEO Jim D'Arezzo has had a long and distinguished career in the high-tech arena.
Condusiv was founded in 1981 by Craig Jensen as Executive Software. Over 37 years, he has taken the thought leadership in file system management and caching, and transformed it into enterprise software. For more information, visit http://www.condusiv.com.
1. Targett, Ed, "Azure Outage as Lightning Strike Forces Data Centre Offline," Computer Business Review, September 5, 2018.
2. Foley, Mary Jo, "Microsoft South Central U.S. datacenter outage takes down a number of cloud services," ZDnet.com, September 4, 2018.
3. Columbus, Louis, "The global state of enterprise analytics 2018: How cloud, big data and AI are key to the future," Cloud Computing News, August 23, 2018.
4. Scarpati, Jessica, "Big data analysis in the cloud: Storage, network and server challenges," TechTarget, June 21, 2012.
SOURCE Condusiv
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