Ashley Bell

This past week's Microsoft-T-Mobile-Sidekick data loss mess is the latest in a string of high profile cloud computing outages that have grabbed headlines over the past couple of years. Here's a short history of cloud computing SNAFUs: Microsoft Danger outage: Contacts, calendar entries, photographs and other personal information of T-Mobile Sidekick users looks to be lost for good following a service disruption at Sidekick provider Danger, a Microsoft subsidiary. Inevitably, the coverage of the initial outage (as well as cloud security breaches) is followed by explanations of why the outage happened (human error, network equipment, hackers, etc.) and analysis stories pointing out the pitfalls of putting your faith in the cloud.

The amount of data and number of users affected wasn't disclosed by Microsoft or T-Mobile, but Sidekick support forums were buzzing with pleas from users looking for tips on how to restore their devices or get their data back. Various explanations have been served up by the vendor, from routing errors to server maintenance issues. Google Gmail fails…again:  When Google's Gmail faltered on Sept. 24, it wasn't down for more than a couple of hours, but it was the second outage during the month and the latest in a disturbing string of outages for Google's cloud-based offerings, including Google search, Google News and Google Apps over the past 18 months. Some have come to Google's defense, saying that even though the company has had its share of outages, we are talking about mainly free services (you get what you pay for, in other words). Twitter goes down…and yes, that's news:  While Twitter had been keeping its Fail Whale in hiding more often than not, a big Twitter outage that lasted throughout the morning and into early afternoon in early August had social networking types fuming. eBay's PayPal crashes: The PayPal online payments system failed a couple of times in August, leaving millions of customers unable to complete transactions.

A denial-of-service attack was blamed for the problem. A network hardware issue was fingered as the culprit for the outage, which lasted for between 1 and 4.5 hours, depending on how you look at it. Rackspace pays up:  Rackspace was forced to pay out between $2.5 million and $3.5 million in service credits to customers in the wake of a power outage that hit its Dallas data center in late June. It cost PayPal millions of dollars in lost business; it's unclear how much it cost merchants. Rackspace, which offers a variety of hosting and cloud services for enterprise customers, suffered power generator failures on June 29 that caused customer servers to go down for part of the day.

This was only a test release of Azure, so observers noted that this obviously wasn't as big a deal as a production service outage. More disruptions followed and Rackspace kept customers up to date via its blog.  Windows Azure test release goes down:  Early adopters of Microsoft's cloud-computing network Windows Azure suffered an overnight outage over a weekend in mid-March during which their applications being hosted on the network weren't available. Separately, Microsoft also suffered a Hotmail messaging system outage in March.  Salesforce.com kicks off the Year of the Cloud Outage:  As CIO.com's Thomas Wailgum reported in January, Salesforce.com suffered a service disruption for about an hour on Jan. 6 due to a core network device failing because of memory allocation errors. IDG News Service contributed to this story. Amazon S3 storage service knocked out:  We actually have to go back to summer of 2008 to find coverage of the last major Amazon S3 cloud network outage, which lasted for 7 to 8 hours and followed another outage earlier last year caused by too many authentication requests.

Lifted by fast-growing notebook shipments, Taiwan's Acer Inc. grabbed the No. 2 spot in the global PC market for the first time over Dell Inc., according to iSuppli Corp. That helped it leap ahead of Dell. The market researcher also confirmed that the PC market is starting to rebound, and now expects this year's sales to be almost flat compared to the prior year's. Boosted by a 17% year-over-year growth in notebook (including netbook) shipments, Acer had 13.4% of the 79.9 million PCs shipped globally in the third quarter, said iSuppli. Hurt by sluggish corporate IT spending, Dell's sales fell 5.9% and it recorded a 12.9% share.

On the rebound, Lenovo's shipments growing 17.2% year-over-year, giving it fourth place. "Acer's rise to the No. 2 rank in the global PC business reflects not only its strong performance in the notebook segment, but also the historic rise of Asia as a primary force in the computer industry," said iSuppli analyst Matthew Wilkins in a statement. Another Asian manufacturer, Lenovo Corp., also had a standout quarter. Acer and Lenovo were ranked just No. 6 and No. 8, respectively, in 2003, Wilkins said. "The Asian manufacturers are a growing force in the global PC business due to their aggressive pricing along with their ability to quickly react and embrace new developments, such as the netbook PC," Wilkins said. Both IDC Corp. and Gartner Inc. had already ranked Acer ahead of Dell. iSuppli is the third market tracker to note Acer's rise to number two. HP remained atop the heap for the 13th straight quarter, with 19.9% of the market.

iSuppli also said that Q3 shipments overall grew year-over-year (1.1%) for the first time in a year, while growing 19% from the second quarter. "The sequential and year-over-year shipment increases show that the PC industry emerged from the downturn and began to grow again in the third quarter," Wilkins said. Toshiba is No. 5 globally, with a 5.0% share, iSuppli said. Notebook shipments were "critical in driving growth," as they never wavered into the negative even during the worst quarters, he added. As a result, the PC market is now expected to decline just 0.9%, rather than iSuppli's earlier prediction of a 4% decline. Christmas and Windows 7 will conspire to "bring more good news for PC makers," said Wilkins.

Over the past decade, the Internet has become a major source of donations for political campaigns and non-profit groups. But it's not just about campaign cash: Piryx also lets groups receive digital reports on their donation activities, review and audit all online donation filings and keep track of potentially inappropriate donations. Piryx, which made its official debut at Network World's DEMOfall '09 this week, is trying to become a one-stop shop for non-profits and politicians who are looking to raise serious cash for their causes. Among other things, Piryx has helped launch the campaign for rocker Jon Bon Jovi's Soul Foundation, a nonprofit aimed at alleviating poverty and homelessness.

What is Piryx's target audience and what is Piryx providing them that PayPal currently cannot? In this interview, Piryx founder and CEO Tom Serres talks about the inspiration for his company, what it costs to use Piryx and how he plans on dealing with the threat of politically motivated DDoS attacks. We were originally aimed at political organizations who needed help doing rapid response for online fundraising and who were doing the same things that Barack Obama did, but having the added capability seeing where the donations and support are coming from through all points of virtual connectivity, whether that's through Facebook, Twitter or blogs. Joe Wilson, who became famous for calling the president a liar earlier this month. One recent client we signed up was Rep.

There was a massive surge in both support for and opposition against him. Once he got up and running, he was raising $1.5 million through our system in a matter of days. And he came to us to set him up with an online fundraising page because for him to set up a processing account and then track where all the donations were coming from would have taken a long time using the PayPal API. So we had him up and running in about five to ten minutes and in real time he was able to track where his messages were going, why people were donating to him and so forth. Had he relied on traditional payment processors he wouldn't have had that kind of customization and he wouldn't have been able to deploy it as rapidly as he did. When you create a payment page you can tie it to an affiliate tracking code.

How exactly does it let the user have that level of detail? Then you can push it out to a particular channel such as Facebook, a blog, a social evangelist, a product evangelist or an e-mail marketing campaign. So as a donor you can navigate to that donation page and you can make that donation and then the organization that initiated that page can determine why you were there. It's a gateway for you to communicate with people who might be receptive to your message. They can determine how much of their money they raised from Twitter, Facebook and so forth and get a better understanding of what messages people are reacting to. What steps would I have to go through.

So let's say I'm a politician looking to set up an account with Piryx. When our clients go through our setup process we're going to ask them for things such as bank account numbers and routing information. There's a verification process and we have automated ways of setting them up through that, and we do that to make sure they aren't fraudulent users. If they're a corporation we want their employer ID number, their corporate tax ID, things like that. The basic process is that you fill out a form with all the pertinent information, you submit it, it activates your account and then sends you a link to authenticate your e-mail address.

Basically Piryx gets 4.5% every donation to start. What percentage of each donation made through the system goes to Piryx? Then once your campaign or organization raises $100,000 we gradually cut the rate we take per donation. You were hit by a DDoS attack after Joe Wilson shouted "You lie!" at President Obama earlier this month. Then once you get over $1 million in total donations, we take 4% per donation.

Do you think that as Piryx becomes more of a home for politicians and political organizations it will become more of a target for DDoS attacks? Yes we are and despite getting hit with that DDoS attack, we're even further along in shoring up our protection mechanisms than we thought we'd be at this point. How are you preparing for that possibility? Keep in mind that we're still a small startup company and we have around 150 users nationwide, up from around two users back when we first launched in February. This is our big coming out party. We've been under the radar until DEMO rolled around this week.

NetApp and VMware have each built highly efficient new data centers designed to provide millions of dollars of savings on energy costs each year, the vendors announced separately this week. With average temperatures of 74 degrees Fahrenheit, and efficient ways of delivering cool air to machines, the $45 million building's energy costs will be about $7.3 million less per year than a data center with average efficiency, according to NetApp. "This is one of the most efficient data centers in the world," says NetApp founder Dave Hitz. "We did this using very innovative design, but mostly off-the-shelf components. Inside a green data center NetApp built a 132,000-square-foot facility in Research Triangle Park, N.C., which will house the bulk of its engineering operations and provide a disaster recovery site.

This is a style of building data centers that pretty much anyone can do. A typical PUE is about 2.0. VMware's new data center, in East Wenatchee, Wash., will have a PUE between 1.2 and 1.5, and save the company about $4 million a year in energy costs, VMware said. It's normal stuff, just configured well." The NetApp data center has a PUE (power usage effectiveness) rating of 1.2. That means for each watt of power used by IT equipment, an additional two-tenths of a watt is needed to distribute power to and cool that equipment. The VMware data center uses hydroelectric power, airside economizers to take advantage of cool outside air, a hot aisle containment strategy and virtualization to meet its efficiency goals, the company said. Many data centers run as cold as 65 degrees, Hitz says. "Lots of data centers use very cold air, much colder than you need," he says. "We can run the air up to 74 degrees if we're very careful about how it's routed through and actually pressurize some of the rooms." Inside the data center, NetApp is using its own storage along with virtualized servers running at least eight virtual machines apiece.

NetApp, meanwhile, said it is using cold aisle containment and pressure-controlled rooms that "regulate the volume of air to avoid oversupplying air and wasting energy." Airside economizers let NetApp use outside air 67% of the year, a strategy enabled by NetApp's decision to keep an average temperature of 74 degrees. A cloud-like network will provide remote access to the data center for NetApp engineering laboratories worldwide. About half of the facility is powered up so far, and NetApp expects it will be able to accommodate the company's growth through 2019. Prior to building the new facility, NetApp's engineering data centers were scattered randomly around various office buildings, and the company is in the process of shutting down many of those little IT operations. "For engineering, our goal is to consolidate as much as possible into this data center," Hitz says. The data center supports 2,166 racks and a designed power load of 25 megawatts.

What do you get when you combine the smarts of a computer scientist and a doctor of sleep medicine? The new test, known as thermal infrared imaging (TIRI), uses a thermal infrared camera to monitor breathing waveforms and airflow as a patient breathes in and out of his or her nose. A cool, less invasive way to figure out if patients have sleep apnea, a common problem that causes a snoring a person to momentarily stop breathing while sleeping.

The measurements are processed using computer algorithms and produce results that have proved to be as accurate as traditional test for apnea known as a polysomnography. If you have ever undergone a sleep apnea test, you know how terribly uncomfortable they are. NetworkWorld Extra: 15 genius algorithms that aren't boring The new method also provides doctors with more information about the patient's breathing, according to its creators Ioannis Pavlidis, Eckhard-Pfeiffer Professor of Computer Science at the University of Houston and Jayasimha Murthy, M.D., assistant professor of medicine from the Division of Pulmonary Critical Care Sleep Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston UTHSC at Houston. Traditional sleep tests use a variety of leads and probes on the patient's head, in their nose, one their legs, arms and chest to gather data. Data is collected from a distance by a thermal camera.

TIRI eliminates the needs for the two most obtrusive probes under the nose, the thermistor and nasal pressure probe. As the patient breathes in, cooler air is brought into his or her nostrils, creating a unique thermal signature for inhale. TIRI not only makes it more comfortable for the patient to sleep during the study, but it gathers much more data from an array of points across the patient's lower face. On exhale, the air blown from the lungs is warmer. The traditionally used thermistor only yields information about a specific point, the researchers stated in a release. "During a sleep study a subject has an average of more than 20 sensors attached to the head and body. However, these sensors can disturb sleep and contribute to the patient's anxiety," said Murthy.

It's a very complex procedure where many physiological parameters are simultaneously monitored to help in the diagnosis of sleep disorders. The researchers believe that this new technology could change the way sleep apnea is diagnosed, potentially helping millions of Americans sleep better and possibly live longer, researchers stated. . Approximately 24% of men and 9% of women experience sleep apnea, the researchers stated. The National Science Foundation-funded sleep research will be published in this month's issue of Sleep.

A new service designed to let Twitter users make short, tweet-like phone calls to one another begins its beta testing period today. It's set up to allow Twitter users to launch two-minute, two-way voice chats with any other Twitter user - even without knowing the other person's phone number. Jajah, Inc. , an IP communications company based in Mountain View, Calif., launched the free service, called Jajah@call today.

To use the new service, people have to be users of both Twitter and Jajah, the person receiving the call has to be a Twitter follower of the person making the call. That will certainly be something to behold - and perhaps a sign of the apocalypse." Social networking seems to be leaving the realm of text-online behind. In a statement, Jajah said the system should work on any Twitter platform - from a computer to a mobile phone. "Essentially, this is adding Skype-like functionality to Twitter," said Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group. "This is certainly a valid extension for the Twitter platform, but the one-to-one nature of the feature as it is now is a bit different than the existing Twitter model. "If this catches on," he added, "further developments might include the ability for Twitterers to call all of their followers, which would certainly make it a lot easier for them to stream their every thought and activity without even having to take the trouble to type. Earlier this week, Vivox, a Boston-based company, announced that engineers there are working on an application that should enable Facebook users - whether individuals or groups - to have voice chats online. Vivox said it's looking to add a new dimension to online reunions or meetings. "With Facebook adding much the same functionality, it looks like social networking is moving away from typing all of a sudden," added Olds. "These new mechanisms will be used, but voice probably won't prove to be a must-have feature for most users."

Microsoft made its holiday pitch Tuesday in New York giving a sneak peak at what its gadget lineup will look like. The OS adds improvements to Internet Explorer Mobile, new navigation tools, Flash Lite support, and the introduction of Windows Marketplace for Mobile - a new app store. (See Related: Review of Windows Mobile OS 6.5 HTC Pure) To me Windows Mobile 6.5 seems like a transitional step to a future OS - might it be called Windows Mobile 7? - that could pose a more realistic challenge to Android, iPhone, and other mobile operating environments on the consumer side. Here Microsoft stressed its portable music player Zune, Xbox, Windows Mobile 6.5 OS phones, and Windows 7. Microsoft's Robbie Bach, head of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division, said this season it will stress the integration of "lifestyles" with "work-styles." All eyes were on Microsoft's Mobile 6.5 operating system which was announced today.

As for Zune and Xbox, Microsoft says it will be rolling out a new feature that enables content downloaded to one of these devices to be played back on the other. Microsoft Zune representatives say the move will represent the first in a series of steps by Microsoft toward greater integration between various Windows-enabled hardware devices. The video quality will support an impressive 1080p high-definition (HD) video. In attendance Tuesday was phone makers Samsung, HTC, LG, Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba were all on hand delivering first looks at Windows Mobile 6.5 devices. Microsoft, though, faces increasingly visible competition from both the Google Android and Apple iPhone camps in a struggle to expand beyond its relatively good position in the corporate smartphone space.

Also on hand were mobile carriers Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint, Telus and Bell Mobility. Today Verizon and Google announced a partnership to bring Android-based smartphones, PDAs, and netbooks to market later this year. At the CTIA show in Dallas, TX this week, Samsung and T-Mobile introduced the Behold II, a touchscreen phone that brings together the Linux-based Android operating system with Samsung's new TouchWiz user interface for one-touch access to the user's favorite features and applications.