Technical Glitches Can Cost You Big Time

Posted by on Jul 25, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

Sometimes, pre-planning literally pays off. It’s a lesson that Nasdaq learned in the wake of its horrific issues around the Facebook IPO.  It wasn’t only embarrassing, it proved costly too because Nasdaq recently announced a $62 million plan to compensate customers hurt by the launch issues — and it’s still not clear if that will be enough. According to the Wall Street Journal’s Deal Journal, the compensation has been proposed by the company to help off-set issues during the first day of the Facebook IPO when “Nasdaq couldn’t figure out who owned...

read more

Facebook Joins Netflix in Helping ISPs Deliver Content Efficiently

Posted by on Jun 22, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

GigaOm reported today that Facebook has plans to deploy servers inside ISP data centers to help deliver its growing collection of photos and other future services. This is similar to an announcement from Netflix we covered in this blog earlier this month. Netflix announced it was building open source servers, which ISPs could install in their data centers to help them deal with traffic volume from Netflix. Similarly, Facebook plans to build edge servers, which can help deal with traffic to its growing picture collection, which is only likely to get bigger with its purchase of Instagram in...

read more

The Legacy Environment Challenge

Posted by on May 14, 2012 in Blog | 2 comments

IT management seems simple enough — in a vacuum. But the trouble is nobody has a technology vacuum unless you are a virgin start-up with no legacy systems in place. Most companies however, don’t have the luxury. Most organizations are in fact burdened by a slew of legacy systems and if you are a hospital or insurance company, you could still have databases dating back to the 60s and 70s. When it comes to monitoring, this presents even larger obstacles. So says Nicole Sullivan, a web architect and blogger at Stubbornella, in an interview with Mac Slocumb as part of the Velocity...

read more

Facebook Develops Tools to Keep Up with Monster Monitoring Tasks

Posted by on Apr 30, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

You probably think you have a challenge when it comes to monitoring your systems, and you probably do, but chances are your tasks are minuscule when compared to what Facebook’s IT pros have to deal with. Today, I learned about some tools Facebook’s developers created in-house to keep up with its gigantic monitoring task. For Facebook, and for many companies faced with the blessing and curse of so much data, Facebook could usually tell when something was amiss, but they couldn’t tell why. It’s a data problem that many large companies face — even if it...

read more

Twitter and Facebook Expand Data Centers. Should You?

Posted by on Sep 23, 2011 in Blog | 0 comments

Two of the biggest social networking services in the world announced they were expanding their data centers this week. They are doing it to stay ahead of demand and keep their apps running smoothly. Should you be doing this too? Twitter is increasing their server capacity to keep up with its growing user base which recently passed the 100 million mark, while Facebook is building more in anticipation of greater need due to its new Timeline feature announced yesterday at the Facebook F8 developer’s conference. Now you may be wondering what services like these have to do with your data...

read more