Verizon Cloud shut down passes 30-hour mark

Barb Darrow

Sun, Jan 11, 2015, 7:58 AM

As of about 6 a.m. EST Sunday morning, Verizon’s Cloud was on hour 30 of what could be a 48-hour planned shutdown to rollout a major service upgrade. The provider had hoped — and its PR team had expressed — that most similar closures last 24 hours or less.

One customer Kenneth White, a security architect who designs systems for non-profit and federal clients, followed through on plans to live tweet the outage.

30 hours. pic.twitter.com/Agb4sMVlaV

— Kenn White (@kennwhite) January 11, 2015

Verizon has said that the major upgrade being implemented now will make future upgrades less painful to customers. Updates on the work should post on this Verizon customer forum.

While maintenance and service upgrades are to be expected, and users appreciate getting advanced warning on such events, the prevailing sentiment is that a full day — let alone two days — of no service is beyond the pale.

There are several ways cloud providers can offer high-availability service including hot patching and live migration.

Data center construction fire

In other cloud news last week, there was a fire Friday morning at the construction site of a new Amazon Web Services data center under construction in Reston, Virginia. According to CNNMoney and other reports, Loudoun County firefighters were sent in at 10:12 a.m. and had the fire, reportedly started by welding equipment on the roof, under control in about an hour.

Mirantis makes its OpenStack plug-in friendly

OpenStack upstart Mirantis last week rolled out its OpenStack based on the new Juno OpenStack release. Mirantis has also worked with Tesoro to certify its Trove database-as-a-service in Mirantis OpenStack 6.0. ONe of the key goals is to make it easy for third parties to develop plug-ins that will integrate easily with this release.

In October, Mirantis scored $100 million in Series B funding from Insight Venture Partners with August Capital, Intel, WestSummit Capital Ericsson and SAP, bringing total funding to about $120 million.

Structure Show!

Steve Herrod, who helped VMware become, well, VMware, is now at General Catalyst Partners where he’s looking for startups in proactive security technology, and other areas that will be key in next-gen enterprise infrastructure.

Given the current availability of capable open source software and cheap (near-free) cloud infrastructure, there’s never been a better time to be a startup, Herrod notes. But listen to the whole show. He knows whereof he speaks.