Data center downtime increasing – is the network at fault?

[fsn_row][fsn_column width="12"][fsn_text] The optimistically-named Uptime Institute has tracked publicly available information to determine that data center downtime is on the rise, likely do to increasingly complex IT systems and networks. Everyone's favorite downtime culprit in the data center, power failures, are still a common cause, but seems to be implicated less often these days in [...]

Cost of downtime is a personal question

[fsn_row][fsn_column width="12"][fsn_text] Everyone has one, but it's still not an easy subject for most people. We're talking about the cost of downtime in their network. It's not an easy calculation if you want to be accurate, but one would be hard pressed to find anyone that says network downtime today is LESS expensive than in [...]

Network outage at AWS linked to typo

February went out with a whimper for many companies that utilize Amazon Web Services' S3 cloud storage thanks to a wide-scale network outage caused by an incorrect command entered by an S3 team member. The four-hour incident impacted news organizations, enterprise chat apps like Slack, and many more. AWS owns 40% of the cloud services [...]

New thinking on incident response

Airbnb matches thousands of travelers with over 2 million rental property listings on their website daily. Reliability is key to the success of the company valued at over $30 billion. A recent interview with a site reliability engineer at Airbnb covered some key metrics for incident response in the high visibility, high uptime operation. Beyond [...]

Dividing what’s left: IT project ROI

A common stat thrown around the industry is that 75% of IT resources go to maintaining the status quo. It's a testament to the mission critical nature of IT in the enterprise—new technology is great, but you've got to keep things up and running, first and foremost. This makes prioritizing IT projects critical, and a [...]

Calculating downtime cost with lots of zeros

Yesterday two high profile outages made the news. United Airlines experienced some kind of a router problem and halted flights for over an hour, and the New York Stock Exchange had to close trading for over three hours while they recovered from what was termed a software rollout issue. While not enough information has been [...]

Is IT getting more stressful or younger?

A recent survey found that 78% of IT workers consider their job stressful. In 2014, the number was 77%, but in 2013 and 2012 it was 57% and 67%. Few people would argue that IT careers can challenge the notion of a work-life balance. Stress at work and home Of the more than 200 IT [...]

Making the out-of-band link your in-band

When it comes to secure connectivity, Uplogix has a variety of out-of-band options. But did you know that the out-of-band connection, invaluable for network management, can also be used as a failover for network traffic in the event of losing the primary connection? The upcoming Uplogix software release will include this functionality. Uplogix really lets [...]

Network slowdowns top IT issues

IT groups in large companies still consider network outages and slowdowns as their greatest headaches. In a recent survey of over 400 IT managers in companies with 1,000 or more employees, just under half listed network issues as their most common unexpected issue. The most common day-to-day issues included application performance problems (37%), availability issues [...]