aesoteric writes "Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison has used the keynote of Oracle OpenWorld to launch the 'Exalogic Elastic Compute Cloud' — an appliance combining server and storage hardware with a pre-tuned web server, hypervisor and other middleware. Introducing the product as 'a honking big cloud in a box,' Ellison shifted from his previous criticism of the terms 'cloud computing' and 'private cloud' by using the exact same terms to sell a physical appliance." Oracle also took the wraps off Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle Linux, which is based on the 2.6.32 Linux kernel.

mpapet writes to ask about the ins and outs of datacenter evaluation. Beyond the simpler questions of physical access control, connectivity, and power redundancy/capacity and SLA review, what other questions are important to ask when evaluating a data center? What data centers have people been happy with? What horror stories have people lived through with those that didn't make the cut?

miller60 writes "In their efforts at uptime, are data centers relying too much on infrastructure and not enough on best practices? That question is at the heart of an ongoing industry debate about the merits of the tier system, a four-level classification of data center reliability developed by The Uptime Institute. Critics assert that the historic focus on Uptime tiers prompts companies to default to Tier III or Tier IV designs that emphasize investment in redundant UPSes and generators. Uptime says that many industries continue to require mission-critical data centers with high levels of redundancy, which are needed to perform maintenance without taking a data center offline. Given the recent series of data center outages and the current focus on corporate cost control, the debate reflects the industry focus on how to get the most uptime for the data center dollar."