The evolution of the Database - from Lotus 123 to the cloud
5 Steps to Bullet-proofing your Online Infrastructure
We did it again! The ScaleArc software has repeatedly earned kudos in the industry, from our customers, from Gartner, and from industry press. Today we announced our software won a Gold Stevie® Award– the top winner of New Product of the Year in Software for Cloud Infrastructure.
England’s National Health Service generates some amazing stats:
NHS Choices, the online interface to the NHS’s education and information resources, understandably has a scaling challenge – the website has to support more than 50 million visits every month. As often happens, the database proved the most challenging technology layer to scale.
It’s that time of year again, when the IT staff at eCommerce companies is staring down a looming deadline – get the infrastructure ready for the Black Friday surge in the next few months or risk the lost revenue and bad headlines that follow a meltdown.
For decades, Disaster Recovery (DR) has dominated the landscape as the best architecture for business continuity. The problem is, DR expects you to have a disaster, and then to recover from that disaster. Because that capacity sits idle until disaster strikes, many customers call that “Dark DR.”
In today’s digital business world, of course, disasters aren’t tolerated well. A majority of organizations cite considerable loss to revenue and/or reputation if their online offerings go down. Rather than build DR structures, organizations today need to design for Continuous Availability. Continuous availability, in turn, requires active/active architectures.
I’m just back from Gartner’s Data and Analytics conference this week, and Gartner analysts spent the week making a passionate case for the critical role of the Chief Data Officer or CDO. This opinion stands in stark contrast to observations from a CIO conference I attended, where speakers argued that a CDO was a sign of failed alliances, needed only when the CIO and CMO can’t get along.
So which is it – the next great title to aspire to in IT, or proof that execs haven’t grown up?
As President Trump begins his administration, he continues to use a variety of channels to send messages about his thoughts and plans. These can take many forms – tweets, Executive Orders, even off-the-cuff comments in a speech or press conference. And we’ve seen the impact these communiques have had – moving stock prices, spurring protests, and generating press frenzies.
Most people simply observe these reactions – but some organizations have been majorly impacted by any of these acts by President Trump. This past weekend, for example, in the wake of President Trump’s Executive Order banning immigrant from predominantly Muslim countries, the ACLU found its website crashing under the load of handling an enormous spike in online donations.
Enterprises have spent billions of dollars and decades of time honing their Disaster Recovery (DR) plans and processes – 2017 will be the year that DR will die. How could such a central tenet of IT operations disappear? Simply put – it just doesn’t cut it anymore.
DR depends on having a second set of resources – equipment, data, people – ready to take over operations when your first location experiences a disaster. You maintain those systems miles away, to avoid a natural disaster from taking out both locations. You practice the transition of operations at least once a year, and you document every step needed to succeed in the transition. This mode is called active/passive or active/idle.
Just last week we launched our ScaleArc Gives Back program, realizing a goal I’ve held during my time here at ScaleArc.
A few years back, I enjoyed a passionate conversation over lunch with a small group of people, including Marc Benioff, the founder and CEO of Salesforce.com. I became inspired by his 1-1-1 model for philanthropy and the resulting Pledge 1% movement. Giving back to our communities, on a global scale, has been a goal of mine for ScaleArc throughout my tenure here. The people of our company have consistently demonstrated the desire and ability to help others, and now we have the opportunity to do that collectively as a company.
“Getting this award is quite the honor – you guys made me look good!” So says our latest Uptime Hero, Michael Atkins, director of IT operations for DealerSocket. But he’s got it backwards – he and his team make ScaleArc look good, leveraging our software to deliver 99.999 uptime, as he shared in his video.
As people all over the globe get ready to visit family during the holidays, ScaleArc’s latest survey shows many Americans fear that airline database downtime could mean they lose time with loved ones or they’ll experience flight delays.
Depending on their business, ScaleArc’s customers experience surges in website or application use at different times of the year. For our eCommerce customers, it’s Black Friday. For our movie ticketing customers, it’s blockbuster releases. For our airline customers, the holidays always deliver a surge both in passengers and website/mobile app usage.
