At Catchpoint, we don’t just write blogs – we read them too! We often share worthy articles with clients and wanted to expand the sharing to the blog followers. On a weekly basis we will post on our blog a digest of the most interesting articles on IT Operations and Web Performance. Enjoy them and share them with friends and colleagues.
Cloud Pricing Wars – Game On
Last week, Amazon AWS reduced their prices by as much as 42% for certain reserved EC2 instances. This was the 19th time Amazon lowered their prices and it triggered a pricing war in the cloud space. Google was quick to announce on the same day their new reduced prices that are slightly lower than AWS. While 3 days later Microsoft followed up with prices cuts on Azure. While the lower prices will help with the migration to the cloud, companies shopping for a cloud provider are still challenged by the difference in the computing instances packages which make any comparison quite hard. Maybe the Cloud Providers need to introduce a price/unit concept like the products in your local grocery shelves.
Web boom causes demand for new data centers
A new report out by Campos Research and Analysis on behalf of Digital Realty Trust shows a growing demand for more data centers worldwide. In North America 92% of the respondents claimed they will probably to definitely increase their colo spending this year in the US, Europe, Asia Pacific, and South America, in order of planned expansion. 85% of respondents worldwide intend to increase resources as opposed to 82% at the end of 2010.
Creative Crash Pages Making the Best Out of a Bad Situation
Despite ample prevention, all sites are bound to crash or be unavailable at some point. How a company handles such scenario, can make a difference. Bonobos showed during the Small Business Summit 2012 that with a little bit of humor and a dash of humility, a well thought out Down Page can turn a revenue crisis into a marketing opportunity, even if the crash happened on Cyber Monday. Other retailers should take notice and plan for similar action in 2012 – it pays off to be ready.
IBM Processor Can Move Data at 1 Tb/s
As computing technology is advancing and servers pack more and more processors, the network overhead or latency is becoming a growing bottleneck. IBM released a new solution, the Holey Optochip, which can move data at 1 trillion bits per second (1 terabyte per second) by firing lasers through the 48 holes in the chip. The Holey Octochip (not for sale) is 8 times faster than the fastest chips in the market today and 10k times faster than a standard 100 Mb/s Ethernet connection.