Gmail and cloud computing data integrity

Chances are everyone has a Gmail account today, whether they use it or not the popularity
of Gmail has gone from invitation only 10 years ago to free open registration and use today. Popularity basis of Gmail is ranked next to that of Hotmail.com, Yahoo.com and Aol.com email addresses by my own research study.  In addition, Gmail users also count for every Android device as one of these accounts is required to activate on the mobile.

How much value is put into mail availability?  In addition that includes not only messages but contacts, tasks, conversations and all of the other social media channels available through the major players.  Some users never delete anything their Mailbox is something along the lines of a database and it has archives of every conversation.

The reality how would one take the total loss of all contents from their Gmail account, such a terrifying thought just happened over the weekend and although the impact was 500,000 users in actuality based on an Engadget.com report this is only about 0.29% of all Google Gmail users.  That is very impressive number of users although considering it is a free service.  Lucky for me I was not affected by this catastrophic loss of data however I couldn’t stress the importance of backups.  Setup a carbon copy forwarder for all of your messages, I personally dupe mine between @Hotmail and @Gmail this way I have redundancy and a free widely used web service available from anywhere on the internet.

The idea here is that your email is in the cloud and your information is highly available, fast and accessible from anywhere but that’s only as long as you have a backup copy of it. Gmail is a free service and while their engineers are working on recovery for all of its users, cloud computing service are only as resilient as what the end-user has signed up to become and the price to pay for complete data availability.

Loss of data is no fun and it can be a disaster if the backups are not in place considering the medium that is effected such data loss can turn a company or end user upside down. These fallouts are not new to us although generally speaking we aren’t worried about it unless it happens to us.

Just last month in early January of this year, Hotmail.com lost all email for 17,355 customers and while it took about 3 days to get customers mailboxes back not all of them were able to be recovered says the report on InfoWorld here.

Does this change your thoughts when it comes to cloud computing and will you start backing up your information today?

 

Netcraft releases February 2011 Web Server Survey

Are more people using Apache?
With 9.6M new hostnames  there is a 1% point increase in the market share this year from a survey of 284,842,077 site responses.

Reports from Netcraft sourced here are shown indicating that a significant contribution to Apache increases were seen the most at AmeriNOC (4.6M) and Softlayer (1.3M) and while Microsoft and Google both lost hostnames and market share these months there are thoughts on this sudden increase in Apache gains are generating traction from the CMS suites, Drupal, WordPress, Joomla w/ Apache.

Developer	January 2011	Percent	February 2011	Percent	Change
Apache	58,623,115	57.57%	59,595,889	57.35%	-0.21
Microsoft	17,070,240	16.76%	16,359,585	15.74%	-1.02
Google	12,115,707	11.90%	11,946,570	11.50%	-0.40
nginx	8,376,958	8.23%	8,688,338	8.36%	0.14
lighttpd	527,225	0.52%	598,339	0.58%	0.06

We find that the decissions when it comes to hosting are primarily up to the developers and their support for the applications.  While there is no greater of the 2 the open source presence is showing its gains and adaption to CMS suites.   The media industry has been speaking out through the CMS platforms and what better place to start than an infiniCloud, with no contracts, no setup fee you can select your community template, whether it be Windows or Linux and start servicing your projects today.  Sign up here @ infiniCloud.

Cloud and thin clients, the past is future

Cloud – repurpose your old machine with Jolicloud 1.1, download.

Recycle any computer with a useable lightweight web operating system.
For those that are waiting to try out Google chrome OS, this is the product available.

While there are no real benefits in replacing your Win7 or MacOS this is a great operating system available to show the direction we are moving. Away from the heavy operating systems loaded with features that may or may not be needed.

Imagine logging onto your computer by authenticating through Facebook Connect, or Google Gmail (chrome) and then every document you save being stored in the cloud. Turn off your computer, turn on another computer, and restart right where you left off.

I have about a dozen machines and all too often I’m digging up legacy files stuffed in a folder or on a hard disk that I never remembered to relocate. The closest I got was enabling desktop redirection and my documents redirection on a domain controller, but even that had its level of fault… I had to be within that network.

So Jolicloud 1.1 has HTML5, is this push in the direction away from what Apple is trying to bring us? The interface itself looks very iPad/Android’ish. Well super simple and highly effective almost like what the ‘Start’ menu button was to us for over a decade. For anyone wanting Google chrome OS, see if you can get your hands on a CR-48 laptop apply to the Pilot-Program or check on Ebay.

Such features of cloud computing are ever changing, it has been 2 years and the expanding of cloud movement from what started with vmware and other virtual platforms to a broader scale of devices now reaching the end user more than ever. Logicworks recently launched an infiniCloud service that appeals to the public cloud with hybrid growth capabiility it has allowed the provisioning high performing westmere based vms into an easy to afford solution and with no contracts or commitment requirements. With this its now possible for new projects to come up, spin the wheels and then pause or re-provision for new application projects all at the click of a button.