Multicloud Adoption

There is plenty of evidence that businesses large and small are adopting a multicloud strategy. Case in point is a white paper produced by IDC entitled “Adopting Multicloud — A Fact-Based Blueprint for Reducing Enterprise Business Risks”. IDC is a global provider of market intelligence about IT and telecom. The report tells us that the […]

Surprising Cloud Adoption Trends

We all know that businesses are moving to the cloud. But how? Anyone who knows the basics of cloud technology is also aware that there are many approaches to the adoption of cloud technology. An enterprise can choose from public, private, or hybrid solutions. They can go with only one cloud provider or they can […]

Leading Causes of Downtime

IT systems go down for a lot of reasons. Some downtime causes are obvious, while others take some time to understand. And still others are just plain comical. In this article we’ll have a look at different approaches to assigning blame for outages, and we’ll offer a short list of our own. The concept of downtime applies […]

Is Liquid Cooling Worth the Risk?

Water and computers don’t mix, right? So why would anybody want to try to cool computer equipment with water? Lots of reasons. But the first thing you think, of course, is this: “Will it leak?” Well, probably not — but we’ll get into that. You should know that water and computers are definitely not mutually […]

Can Too Much Redundancy Impact Availability?

After unabashedly extolling the virtues of redundancy in a recent article , you may be wondering why we would follow up with another post questioning whether sometimes too much (redundancy) was just too much. Credit fellow staffers for the suggestion that we revisit the issue.  The problem was clearly a part of our initial research, and it deserves […]

Internet Load Balancing and Failover for Multiple ISP Links

Controlling traffic is a key facet of internet management. Sometimes primary connections will go down. Or too much traffic may cause congested links or overwhelmed devices to become unusable. We wrote about the implementation of load balancing in the cloud in a 2017 blog post. When people think of load balancing, they usually think about traffic that […]

One Summer Street Data Center Fire

Data center outages are not at all uncommon, and because of that we don’t bring your attention to them on a regular basis. However, this writer has seen firsthand the “no expense spared” architecture at Boston’s One Summer Street, so when Markley Group’s impressive flagship data center – the largest colocation facility in New England with almost […]

HTTP/2 Makes the Internet Faster

If you have ever worked on a farm or have done construction, you probably got used to carrying things. And you might have heard your supervisor say at some point, “Get it all in one trip if you can.” That’s the idea behind HTTP/2. Earlier versions of HTTP required multiple TCP streams to transfer the […]

Selecting the Right Monitors for Your Website

Suppose you’ve just launched a new website and you want to make sure that everything keeps working fine. What’s the next step? You could just hope and pray, but there is merit to being more proactive than that. The responsible thing to do is to monitor your website, including all the critical pages, services, and […]

Redundancy: When Too Much is Just Right

Redundancy is indispensable in the world of information technology. Of course, redundancy is not welcome in every aspect of life. If your company doesn’t need you anymore and makes you “redundant”, you’ll have to look for another job. Poorly written text may be credited to the Department of Redundancy Department. The concept of redundancy is […]