tech stuff

Gmail may not yet have the same footprint as Microsoft Exchange, but megadeals such as a recently announced 30,000-seat installation at Valeo prove that large enterprises are comfortable running applications in the cloud.

mbone writes “Earlier today there was a confirmed Google outage which got a lot of attention from network operators. From a post to NANOG after everything calmed down: ‘Google ack’da maintenance on their core network did not go as planned-Forced traffic to one peer link that was unable to handle all the traffic. Maintenance has been rolled back. Issue has been restored.’ This is exactly what makes me nervous about cloud computing and data storage. It’s bad enough when I screw up a config and it takes down my mail, but what about when it happens to the entire globe at once?” Several readers also point to CNET’s coverage of the outage. Update: 05/14 19:25 GMT by T : CWmike adds this: “Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes that what may be happening is a massive DDoS attack. Based on the size of the attack that would be needed to interfere with Google, I believe that it’s quite likely to be the result of an attack from the controllers of the Windows worm, Conficker. Another theory that has been put about — that the problem was due to AT&T NOC routing problems — does not appear to hold water, writes Steven.”

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demishade writes “Peacekeeper, the browser benchmark from the makers of 3DMark comes out of beta and shows an interesting (though perhaps not surprising) tidbit — the more popular a browser, the worse its performance. While it should not be surprising to anyone that IE slugs at the last place, the gap between Firefox and Chrome, is. Once IE’s market share goes the way of the Dodo will web developers start cursing Firefox? How long until Google comes out with a JavaScript intensive application that will practically require Chrome to function?”

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