The fact of the matter is while a some companies suffered service degradation and a few were down hard, many other companies carried on just fine.  The difference? The services that did not suffer a major disruption had loosely coupled and distributed networks, while those that did had one or more single points of failure in the affected area. Keep in mind that every data center, no matter how robust, can and likely will suffer outages from time to time.  How services are architected on top of physical infrastructure is what makes the difference between whether a data center outage means small loss of capacity or whether it leads to extended downtime. Amazon, as well as other Cloud infrastructure providers offer a number of tools to help their customers avoid single points of failure.  It is up to their customers however, to take full advantage of them.

While not every service disruption is preventable, it is important for companies to realize that they are the ones ultimate responsible for any disruptions that do occur.  Netflix to their credit, has admitted to lessons learned and noted areas where they can improve.  This is not to let Amazon off the hook, but rather a reminder that Cloud is not in and of itself redundant.  It is however, a great platform to make services redundant.

This agreement makes it easier for Acme Packet’s customers to utilize IceHook Systems’ suite of software applications, which includes enhanced call routing (including LCR), rate management, and Call Detail Record (CDR) management solutions.

The irony is that an external hard drive as is about as far away from ‘cloud as you can get.  In fact, it is quite literally the opposite of cloud. The best part of the product description reads ‘Create your own personal cloud, without the monthly fees and mysterious location of your data’. Exactly!  I want to know just where my backup data is as it is getting destroyed along with my primary data!

Really?!

Marketers have so fully diluted the word and the concept of cloud, that is has been rendered essentially useless.   What clients must ask themselves is the following question: ‘What am I buying?’ Is it a real distributed, elastic and resistant infrastructure or is it some marketer’s buzz word?

Not enough?  How about reports?  Slinger™ provides current or historical quality and business reports across multiple platforms using a single user-friendly interface.

The best part of all of this?   If you are a customer, you already have it.  All you have to do is ask.

Slinger CDR Viewer

We have integrated Slinger™ with OpenCDRRate and have added it to the list of global CDR templates.  We have also extended an offer to all OpenCDRRate users to store up to 1 million records on Slinger™ for free.

As we have stated previously, we are no fans of governments snooping on their citizens, but we are here to help service providers comply with regulations.

No more trying to email a 25 MB file,  no more thumb drives in the mail, and no more dealing with insecure and unfriendly FTP sites.

Now if we could just think of a name for it.