HAIL #3: At Last Telecom comes With a Reliable Backup

A cloud data center acting as a backup facility for another- a true question, but unanswered for many years. But the year 2012 has shed some much needed light into this question.

The advantage for one such infrastructure is simple. At times of an outage, the backup data centers can act as the primary one and help companies to run their businesses successfully. But the biggest problem is its execution, which is pretty hard. Duplicate systems must be stored in each location. And at the moment of crisis, it's impossible to transfer all the data needed by the system in a few minutes. So preparations need to be made. Data must be replicated to the backup site on an ongoing basis, so in the advent of a disaster, only a few days or few hours of data must follow the migration to the backup site.

Now coming back to 2012, the year also saw the launch of cloud services from data centers owned by telecom providers. One such example is from Savvis, owned by CenturyLink, the third largest U.S. telecom supplier, who united its cloud data centers together with CenturyLink private lines.

HAIL #4: More Cloud Server Types Available

2012 was a year where the cloud world saw servers of different types and of different storage sizes. Amazon led the way in setting the pace of types of virtual servers. It all started with Amazon introducing micro, small, medium and large sized virtual servers. This was followed by extra-large and double extra-large cloud servers. Later, servers that featured high-memory extra-large, double extra-large, and quadruple extra-large were introduced. Concentrated CPUs arrived in the form of high-CPU medium and high-CPU extra-large. Cluster instances, graphics processing unit instances, and high I/O instances round out the list.

Also Read: The Worst Security Mishaps of 2012

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