It’s September and the whether’s warming up again in California. My UPS system dutifully beeped several times today to let me know of power fluctuations,
the most severe of which dimmed the lights momentarily. Now, being a confirmed geek, as I turned the AC down tonight I found myself
wondering if we’d have a repeat of July’s outages at Google,
Yahoo, MySpace and Bloglines. So I started searching for postings to see what folks are doing to prepare. If you spend much time online (and you’re here, so you must) you already know internet titans Yahoo, Google and MSN are spending billions building huge new data centers. Great what about the rest of us?

Eric Lundquist at eWeek (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1995925,00.asp) pushes the old stalwarts of backup and data recovery planning. Oh, and he also suggests you push your server vendor for hardware that let’s you vary the power consumption with the load on the server.

The common wisdom is still to use redundant data centers, but the expense of doing so is beyond the reach of most startups. In fact, even well established service operators have trouble maintaining redundant sites. Setting up a redundant site is expensive and requires a lot of detailed planning. Maintaining it and ensuring it’ll pick up the slack when the primary goes offline is one of the toughest jobs in IT. Oh yeah, and if you’re eco-minded, it increases the overall use of power to serve the same service.

Virtualization pundits sing the praises of server consolidation to increase utilization, and thereby reduce power consumption. It’s a start, and eco-friendly, but doesn’t service online during an outage.

Once again, I have to admit I’m biased, but this all seems like linear thining. The answer is much simpler; eliminate your dependence on hardware altogether. As the hosting industry transitions to utility computing, you’ll not only be able to run your applications consuming less power, but maintaining a redundant site will become simple and cost effective. In fact, we’re working with software developers and hosting providers who want to go beyond simple - and make it automatic.