Tornado clouds, fear, and disaster recovery.

27 Apr 2011

By Ken McElrath

As I ran for cover in the basement of our Chattanooga office today, I was glad for the protection of those 12-inch-thick-concrete walls and floors. Tornado warnings are rare here, but when I saw our commercial size trash cans picked up and carried across the street, I figured fear was an appropriate response, and headed for a secure place.

Just as some unwary cloud chasers fail to see the danger in an approaching storm, some companies found out last week that all computing clouds are not created equal.

Now, I am absolutely sure that Amazon will resolve its EC2 problems. But just two days prior to their unfortunate outages, I had a conversation with a potential partner about SLAs and Amazon. The potential partner makes extensive use of EC2, but Amazon does not currently offer any disaster recovery for its EC2 customers. This won't work for Skoodat customers, who justifiably need full disaster recovery in place, for such a time as this, in the storm weary southeastern U.S.

As I told our potential partner's CEO, Skoodat provides full disaster recovery through our cloud partner, salesforce.com. No extra charge.

The CEO contacted me after the Amazon outage and wondered if I was a prophet. I assured him I was not. But I was thankful I escaped the EC2 storm by choosing our cloud partners carefully.

I like to think of Skoodat as creating solutions that educators can depend upon when other cloud computing solutions fail, kind of like the 12-inch-thick concrete walls and floors of our Chattanooga office.