Internet celebrates 40th birthday
The internet has turned 40 today and it has been revealed that the first system started with a failure.
Back in 1969, the network that is now known as the internet, had its first test - and the system crashed.
A trial message that was supposed to say "Logon" actually read "Lo" because the network failed before the other letters were typed in.
In the last 40 years the internet has become much more sophisticated and is used in everyday life for business and pleasure.
But this does not mean that crashes and failures do not still take place.
Disaster recovery and data protection is vital for companies and business internet solutions are becoming more and more essential.
That is why the new technology by Google, which provides high-levels of data-redundancy to data centres, is so interesting.
Nicknamed Spanner the technology was been officially presented in a paper given at Large scale Distributed Systems and middleware (LADIS) on October 10th and 11th.
It allows information to be copied, backed-up and stored automatically - this is all based upon pre-set constraints and anticipations of usage.
According to Tom Collins, the network manager for the hosting and collocation data company Q4L, this is a good thing - especially for disaster recovery.
"If you lose internet, then it might be useful for quickly diverting one website over to another site," he added.
Mr Collins remarked that it would also be helpful if there were problems with the equipment at a data centre.
He commented that the technology was likely to be adopted by a large number of data centres and added that from a customer point of view it was a good thing.
Another method of protecting data in the instance of a business internet disaster is that of cloud computing.
But, according to research by Platform Computing, organisations and businesses are afraid that they would lose control with external cloud computing.
Immature technology and lack of control were the main reasons that 82 per cent of senior IT managers are not using hosted environments outside their own firewalls.
Martin Harris, director of product management at Platform Computing, said companies reservations about control were justified.
He explained that without control, business service delivery methods could go "askew".
"Without that control level there's really no way to ensure the service level that the business is achieving and so they are looking for a central control mechanism to enable that," he said.
But Mr Harris remarked that they had been surprised to note that control and not security was companies main concerns regarding cloud computing.
Three-quarters of the companies questioned by Platform Computing used shared infrastructures or private clouds for production enterprise applications such as Customer Relationship Management in addition to Test/Dev.
In addition, the number of global businesses who are using cloud computing has grown and increased by 320 per cent since the start of 2009, a study by Kelton Research and commissioned by Avanade has revealed.
However, although more companies are moving towards using cloud computing, the study showed that there was still little support for cloud-only models.
The majority of global businesses use a combination of internally owned and cloud systems.
If you would like more information on 8el's Disaster Recovery solution, please call our sales team on 0118 338 3062 or email info@8el.com.
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