The most dangeours type of downtime is the one you don't know about. It is discturbing how true that one line actually is. Should it occur, website/server downtime can and will cause problems and ripples throughout your organization. Before we get tarred and feathered for making such a bold statement, let us build our case.

The Problem

In this realworld situation, a business lost roughly 30% of their leads for July. Apart from their initial loss, they simply handed out a good portion of the market to their competitors, in high season. When the figures arrived, all hell broke loose. All major markets felt the downturn. In search for a logical explanation, hours of daytime were invested in finding the reason. After it was made clear that the traffic was stable, the management went on to search for answers somewhere down the line. The marketing team had to pull out detailed reports for their activities in the last three months. Seasonal sales people got numerous tests calls. A full-scale internal audit took place. This caused a ripple effect and the normal workflow was seriously disrupted.

There are currently 121 existing submarine communication cable systems with 25 more planned for the next few years. That sounds like a lot but actually, they are way more than this. 121 is the number of all currently functioning underwater communication cables.

Is SSD (Solid State Drive) the solution for the ever widening gap between current hard drive technology and CPU advancements? Is this the next step in data storage and are SSD drives here to stay? How reliable are they? Are they actually worth it?

It seems that the end of the copper-wire era in communication technologies will leave many households without any income. Scraping old copper cables is not uncommon in many parts of the world. The latest attempt to unearth communication cables coined a new term “Spade Hacking”. It now seems that all one needs to severe the communication systems of a small country is, in fact, a spade.

I thought that after the SheevaPlug some time will pass before we see even smaller computers intended for light IT tasks. This time the project is even smaller. It is called the Raspberry Pi. At its current state it looks like this. You might think the product has a long way to go before it hits the market, but you are wrong. One of the ideas of the creator is to bring computing closer to students and inspire them to learn more about the hardware and how it works. That is why it will most likely look like this, when the first units head out to public schools.