Reddit, Foursquare, EngineYard and Quora were among the many sites that went down recently due to a rather prolonged outage of Amazon's cloud services. On Thursday April 21, When Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) went offline, it took many of its Web and database servers depending on that storage down. With Amazon working aggressively to set this back right, on Sunday April 24, most of the services were restored back . As promised and as would be expected, Amazon has now come out with a detailed explanation describing what went wrong, and explaining why the failure was so widely felt and why it took that much time to restore back all the services. Some say that measured against Amazon’s promised availability, this lengthy outage would mean that Amazon may need to maintain full availability for more than a decade to adhere to their promised availability service level commitments.
Now, let’s examine what happened and how this happened. To start with some basics: Amazon has its facilities spread out around the world. Most users would know that its cloud computing data centers are in five different locations. Virginia, Northern California, Ireland, Singapore, and Tokyo. These centers are so architected that within each of these regions, the cloud services are further separated into what Amazon calls Availability Zone. The availability zones are within themselves self contained with physically and logically separate groups of computers setup therein. Amazon explains that such an arrangement helps customer choose the right level of redundancy as appropriate to their win needs. Such a design with a spectrum of options helps customers choose the right level of robustness also when they for a premium choose to host them in multiple regions. The logic here is that hosting in multiple availability zones within a same region must provide comparable robustness (as in hosting across multiple regions) but would come with a much better economics benefitting the customer.
Amazon offers several services as part of this arrangement. Amongst those services, Elastic Block Store(EBS) is an important service. With EBS, Amazon provides mountable disk volumes to virtual machines using the more well known Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2). This is quite attractive to customers, as Amazon with this service, provides the virtual machines with huge amount of reliable storage – typically this gets used for database hosting and the like. The powerfulness of this feature can be seen by the fact that while this can be used from EC2, another Amazon feature called Amazon Relational Database Service( RDS) also uses this as a data store. As an added feature for its services, Amazon has designed this feature for high availability purposes and replicates data through EBS between multiple systems. Given the volume and variety involved therein, this process is highly automated. In such an arrangement, if for some reason an EBS node loses connection form its replica, instantly an alternate storage within the same zone is made available to maintain connectivity.
As per Amazon, while doing routine maintenance operations in Virgnia operations on April 21, engineers were trying to make a change in network configuration to the zone. As part of the process, traffic to the routers affected apparently got moved into a low capacity network as against getting moved onto a backup. The low capacity network, is meant for handling inter node communication and not large scale replication/data transfer internally between the system and so the additional traffic made the network malfunction. With the primary network brought down for maintenance and the secondary network completely mal-functioning the EBS nodes lost their ability to replicate for want of nodes. This is where the unintended consequence of automation began to rear its ugly head. Every system in this network acted as if they are at risk and began to frenetically look for available nodes with free space for replication. While Amazon tried to restore the primary network, damage has been by then done, with all the available space within the cluster were already used, while some remaining nodes continued their search for nodes with free space available – while such nodes with free space were not available.
With a massive deadlock of nodes trying to find replicas, while there were not nodes with free space, impacted the control system’s performance. The control system performance issue severely impacted execution of new service requests like creating a new volume. A long back up began to get created for the slow control system to act upon and this with time reached catastrophic proportions, with some requests beginning to get returned with fail messages. Now, comes the second but the most crucial part of the outage – unlike other services, the control systems span across the region and not the individual availability zones. The net impact was therefore experienced across different availability zones. Remember the idea of Single Point Of Failure? That was proven here in its full might.
Slowly and deliberately, Amazon began the course correction – by beginning to tend to the control system and by adding more nodes to the cluster. Over time, the backlogs on the control system began to get cleared and this took painful efforts and a lot of time in the process. Outages of public cloud systems have made news in the past but clearly with time, the body of knowledge and maturity levels ought to improve things. Cloud service providers make high availability as the cornerstone of their offerings but this outage would in many ways, put such claims to question. Even while this outage happened with Amazon Virginia operations, there were many users of AWS, who managed to maintain availability of their system. A majority of those installations had fall back in terms of multiple regions, multiple zone coverage. Such moves necessarily bring cost, complexity equation into consideration.
It’s a little odd to see that when the problem of non availability of nodes happened, Amazon almost began to get into a denial –of-service attacks within their environment . Amazon now claims that this aspect of crisis related actions have been set right but one may have to wait till next outage to see what else could give way It may be noted that Amazon cloud services suffered a major outage in 2008 – the failure pattern looks somewhat similar upon diagnosis.Clearly, the systems need to operate differently under different circumstances – while it’s normal for nodes to keep replicating on storage/access concerns, the system ought to exhibit different behavior with a different nature of crisis. With the increasing adoption of public cloud services, certainly the volume, complexity and range of workloads would increase and the systems would get tested under varying circumstances for availability and reliability. All business and IT users would seek answers to such questions as they consider moving their workloads onto the cloud
It is interesting to see how Netflix, a poster user of Amazon cloud services managed to survive this outage. Netflix says,” When we re-designed for the cloud this Amazon failure was exactly the sort of issue that we wanted to be resilient to. Our architecture avoids using EBS as our main data storage service, and the SimpleDB, S3 and Cassandra services that we do depend upon were not affected by the outage”. Netflix admits that their service ran without intervention but with a higher than usual error rate and higher latency than normal through the morning, which is the low traffic time of day for Netflix streaming. Amongst the major engineering decisions that they implemented to avoid such outages includes designing things as stateless applications and maintain multiple redundant hot copies of the data spread across zones. Netflix calls their solution –“ Cloud Solutions for the Cloud” as the claim here is that instead of fork-lifting the existing applications from their data centers to Amazon's and simply using EC2, with their approach they believe that they have fully embraced the cloud paradigm. Essentially, Netflix has automated its zone fail-over and recovery process, hosted its services in multiple regions while reducing its dependence on EBS.
Clearly there are ways to get the best of cloud – except that some of these may have different economics and would call for greater ability to engineer and manage the operations. Amazon may have to increase the level of transparency in terms of their design and the operational metrics need to cover many more areas of operations as against the narrow set of metrics that users get to see now. To sum up , I would hesitate to call AWS as failure of the cloud but this journey into the cloud would call for more preparation and better thought out design to be in place from user’s side.
AWS Outage & Customer Readiness
Bill Harmon from Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit to Speak at June Event
Reinvention Week 6: Remembering the Burn
Let me share a piece of my experience a few years back, in a story I call...
Darkness was descending as we pedaled toward the great desert Playa. A sandstorm kicked up out of nowhere, and we put on our goggles and masks and headlamps, as we had done several times in the past few days. But the airborne sand thickened to such an intensity that we soon had to abandon our bikes and set out by foot. Unable to see more than a few inches in front of our faces, our hands on each other's shoulders so not to separate, we slowly walked in what we hoped was the general direction of the Mausoleum.
Now, the truth was, even during daylight, the Mausoleum had been extremely difficult to find in the vast desert. We kept walking, assuming we would run into some of the thousands of other Burning Man participants we believed to be nearby. But minutes turned into miles. The sand was unrelenting, and we came across no one. I drank my last sandy swallow from my water flask. We had lost all bearing of where we came from and where we were heading.“Do you think we should turn around?” Aaron asked, slight panic creeping into his voice. It was hard for us to hear each other, both because of the sand muffling all sound except its own blowing and because we spoke through surgical masks or bandanas over our mouths.
“Does anyone even know how to get back?” asked Bea. We would have looked at each other for the answer but we could see nothing and already knew the answer was no.
* * *
The adventure began a few days before: We were lucky to find perhaps the last available RV in all of Northern California, and six of us first-timers packed up and headed out from San Francisco to Burning Man, the week-long festival-carnival in the otherwise uninhabitable desert of northern Nevada. Read the rest of the story here.
CIOs & Cloud Centric IT Organization Refresh Strategies
As enterprises concentrate on growth, they remain vigilant about costs and operational efficiencies – coming out of recession, even in times of high growth and radiant optimism. Such a model of growth provides IT with a lot of fresh opportunities to adapt and innovate . More than ever, this new model of growth mandates IT to raise its strategic importance to the business rather than just be content to focus on delivery of generic business plans. In many ways the tenor of change is set in with such changing context – With the continuing tight budgets, the CIO’s are now getting forced to” think and act different” – one of the critical ways that can be tried is to follow the time tested model of being creative in discarding the past while taking a bold and fresh approach in creating a new future of IT within enterprises.
The classic way of looking into conceptualizing a new IT organization and its contribution to the enterprise starts by thinking aloud typically by asking the question “What If?” Now in the radar of every CIO and IT organization, Cloud happens to be mostly at the top where some expect more than half of new workloads to naturally move to the cloud besides the expectation that a majority of applications and infrastructure inside the enterprises would move to the cloud over the next few years. That forces the hand of enterprises in ensuring quick think through of the future possibilities for IT in terms of alternate models and the cloud.
Let’s face the facts : CIO’s of large organizations have to manage the burden of the past in terms of legacy systems, data and the processes set in there. They come with huge costs in terms of maintenance and in many cases impose restrictions on flexibility and extensibility. More importantly, in many cases, these systems come in the way of contributing to business agility in an increasingly dynamic world of business across industries,
The cloud model is increasingly being adopted by companies looking to lower cost and improve scalability and enhance flexibility. Many different models of cloud adoption abound varied by size, maturity, expectations, nature of the industry etc. But all agree on one need – cloud services need to be well integrated with existing legacy systems. Some are choosing a hybrid approach between online and on-premise services as a low-risk way to test the benefits. To work, these cloud services need to be well integrated with existing legacy systems.
Possibilities include selectively letting go of the past and unlocking resources and in realigning priorities and setting new directions towards creating more space for innovation and greater business value. Some CIO’s see this as an opportunity to look beyond delivery models towards getting strategic advantage to business through sophisticated information and insights. Cloud centric technologies are a big driver in enabling IT to take center stage in support of innovation, business growth and delivered value.
For enterprises and the CIO, this journey is replete with possibilities, challenges where the upside swing could be alluringly high but the downside fall could be steep if not carefully strategized and executed on those strategies well enough. After all, we are living in an era where technology edge is almost equivalent to business edge and this warrants a new approach to business technology architecture and strategy. That’s when Saugatech came with the interview with Mike Wilens, on Fidelity’s cloud journey , I got real interested.
In a very detailed discussion Mike covers a series of topics and brings out the fact that while people talk a lot about lock-in, reliability, and security in the cloud , these are manageable with good engineering and good planning and it’s not really all that scary – cloud is indeed doable and can be a key enabler for business innovation and enterprise agility. The key here is that the cloud is indeed revolutionary in how we think about application delivery and infrastructure.
In discussions published as part of cloud leadership strategies, Mike outlines the approach to the cloud, the execution plan and alignment to business needs. Covering all aspects of cloud journey within Fidelity, there are lots of important insights coming out of actual experience. Starting with foundational issues, such as standards, cost avoidance and experimenting with new capabilities in the Cloud, the discussion then extends to centralization versus decentralization. Inside Fidelity, the cloud model is slowly altering the degree of decentralization with a view to lower costs but not compromise on ability to innovate around business needs. The key insight here is dealing with reducing risk and cost while not inhibiting innovation that can lead to top line growth.
Moving onto the more interesting aspects of cloud and business the discussions revolve around business innovation, governance frameworks and balancing opportunity and risk. In areas like collaboration and social computing tools, the logic behind determination of what can be used internally and taking into account the regulatory standards, the usage of such tools externally requires very carefully considered solutions. Wilens points out that the standards that are evolving to help public clouds power down the economies of scale are now becoming available for private clouds as well.
Cloud can be a big platform for testing out /piloting new ideas and can be scaled out and scaled up – at any point in time this pilot footprint on cloud should be actively pursued. For example, he believes that migration to mobile devices and the related implications for the presentation layers of any technology infrastructure will be implemented within the cloud based technologies, private or public. Similarly co-opting the startup partners to try out new operational/innovative models and make them scale up on the cloud infuses new dynamics in developing partnerships and new offerings. Fidelity has found that private Cloud portals can deliver to its clients access to financial information, while still maintaining the on-premise, legacy, mainframe record keeping systems. Here comes the reinforcement, that hybrid solutions leveraging the data of on-premise systems will soon become the norm.
The best practices talked about ranges from adopting de-facto cloud standards, for example cloud infrastructure could be coalescing around the LAMP stack. Some other notable insights include:
- Creating shared services with a common platform, look and feel
- Use of cloud as testing environment
- Portioning of clouds – confidential /mission critical data where to keep -on-premise or outside
- What volumes of new workloads to be pushed onto the cloud – particularly in long standing industries like financial services where lot of data tend to be in old but reliable platforms
Operating at both ends of the stacks with a robust risk management plan and governance makes cloud an indispensable framework for IT, Innovation and Business Agility. I recommend reading this for demonstrating that with a good strategy and well laid out execution on such strategy, even in a fast moving but highly regulated industry with a lot of legacy system in place, clouds can be successfully and progressively deployed with demonstrable results in providing flexibility and making business agile.
Using Innovation to Fight Cybercrime and Save Our Children
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| Ernie Allen |
Reinvention Week 5: Poetic Interlude
Let Me Tell You Something
What if I lifted both of my arms
up from the sides of my body
dug my elbows into the wall
and catapulted myself forward, feet first
toward you?
Would that lure you from the whirl?
What if you were distracted by a fly near your eye
and you turned to see my body falling on its spine
my body crawling one vertebra at a time
toward you?
Would that disturb your pattern of chatter?
Let me tell you something:
I would like to tear the colors off my skin
and spread their yolk over my face
until I spit rainbows
I would like to turn to the wall,
arch my body
and throw back my head,
until you see the spidery reflections of my lashes on the ceiling,
until they fall like warm sugar into your eyes
and become questions you already know
the answers to
I would like
to love you
~Adam Shames
Belated Thanks to MySQL Community
Things were so busy during and after the MySQL conference it was difficult to write a timely thank-you note. I hope it's not too late to thank the committee now for both awards.
More importantly, I would like to thank the MySQL community as a whole. Replicated data is the lifeblood of MySQL applications. There has been a long history of innovation both within the MySQL engineering team as well as the community as a whole. Working on replication for MySQL is a bit like building cars to operate on the German Autobahn. If you can compete here you can compete anywhere.
Settling in at code.google.com
The fact that the replicator is now fully open source under GPL V2 is kind of old news, so I would instead like to talk about something else: our initial experience setting up the replicator project at code.google.com. In a nutshell, it has been excellent. There are several things that stand out.
- The site is incredibly easy to use. You can customize the home page, add members, add external links, etc. quickly and without having to resort to help.
- It has everything we need. The front page is excellent--clean but also all the information users need to get started. Useful features like issue trackers and Google Groups are cleanly integrated.
- It is very fast.
- So far it seems to have just the right mix of open and closed for our project. Anybody can post to the groups or log issues, but only committers on the project have write access to code and ability to move bugs through issue status.
svn co http://tungsten-replicator.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/builder$ svn commit -m "This does not work"
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: Server sent unexpected return value (405 Method Not Allowed) in response to MKACTIVITY request for '/svn/!svn/act/8d94e398-83ba-46f3-aae2-bd10cb707c4b'
svn: Your commit message was left in a temporary file:
svn: '/home/rhodges/google/tungsten-replicator/builder/svn-commit.tmp'Site credentials are a more insidious problem. Android phone users need to have a Google GMail account to access updates and download apps. (At least that's true for my provider.) Browsers like Firefox do not keep accounts separated properly, so you may run into account confusion when you first get started. On Mac OS X you can get the wrong account in your keychain, which in turn leads to more confusing error messages. This is a Google problem. There is a creeping form of web single-signon using Google, Facebook, and other accounts as identifiers with unintended side-effects for work and personal interactions. It makes you wonder what other problems are out there.
But I digress. As far as the project is concerned the issues look pretty minor. At this point I would recommend code.google.com wholeheartedly for open source projects.
p.s., Tungsten Replicator 2.0.2 is on the way. More on that in another post.
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Reinvention Week 4: Mission Mantras
And I know you do too. So I'm asking you--yes, you, reading this right now--what automatic thoughts do you have that are keeping you small and safe? And more importantly, if you could silence those thoughts and live from an identity that would be closer to your real calling, what identity would that be? Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, to speak at World Innovation Forum
Mr. Hsieh is revered as an innovator and a celebrity in entrepreneurial circles. He sold Zappos for more than $1 billion to Amazon.com in 2009 and his book spent 27 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list last year. Last Sunday the New York Times ran a feature story on Mr. Hsieh which speaks about his background and some of his unorthodox approaches to business. His success has been built in part on his ability to anatomize the way people crave connections with others, and turn those insights into a business plan.
If you would like to see Tony Hsieh in person, register now for The World Innovation Forum The Global Leaders has a special package which includes admission to the 2-day conference, premium seating and a "members only" networking reception the evening of June 7th at The Yale Club. Register today for only $1,390! The lowest price available for the WIF representing a savings of over $950 and the TGL package will give you the opportunity to network with your global peers at The Yale Club. The low price is only for those who act before April 30th! If you would like more information about the event or a sponsorship package, contact Jayme Porkolab at jayme.porkolab@tgleaders.com.
Why Apple is a BUY at these levels
Apple is set to announce record quarterly earnings this month on the heels of the hot launch of the iPad 2 and iPhone 4 on Verizon. The average quarterly estimate is $5.33 EPS on $23.18 billion of quarterly sales - a spectacular growth of 60.10% in earnings, and 71.70% in sales. Compare this to the quarterly earnings growth of 20.80% for the average S&P 500 company. Thus, Apple earnings growth is poised to be more than three times that of the average S&P 500 company.
Apple Muddied Picture
Apple's current P/E is 18.69, while the forward P/E is only 12.56 - a significant undervaluation of Apple's future potential. What's wrong with this picture? Here are possible explanations: 1. Retail investor is holding out until after the earnings are announced 2. Current NASDAQ-100 rebalancing that reduces Apple's 20% stake to around 12%, and surrounding liquidation by funds 3. Steve Jobs medical leave, and speculation about his health 4. Downgrade by JMP Securities analyst.
Apple Quarterly Milestones
Apple has made significant announcements during the last quarter, which should translate to real growth in quarterly sales. Key Apple milestones include:
1. iPad 2 launch in U.S.A on March 11
2. iPad 2 launch in 25 countries on March 25
3. Revved up MacBook Pro launch on February 24
4. iPhone 4 launch on Verizon Wireless on February 2
5. App Store growth juggernaut on January 22
What will be Apple's earnings this quarter?
Three earnings scenarios are plausible:
1. Apple beats the average earnings estimates of $5.33 by at least 50 cents, and announces in the vicinity of $5.83 (40% probability).
2. Apple makes the average earnings estimate of $5.33 (50% probability).
3. Apple misses the average earnings estimate by 10 cents and announces $5.23 earnings (least likely, 10% probability).
Accounting for all probabilities, Apple's mean earnings will be around $5.52 for this quarter; this will increase its prior 12 months earnings to $20.10. If Apple's current P/E were to remain the same at 18.69, Apple stock price should appreciate to $375.57.
There you have it: If Apple delivers reasonable quarterly earnings of $5.52, and current P/E of 18.69 remains constant, Apple's stock price should jump to $375.57.
What's the upside?
Some analysts estimate Apple's earnings to be as high as $5.98. If Apple were to kill its quarterly earnings, and make this high estimate, watch out from above! This will increase Apple's prior 12 months earnings further to $20.56, or fetch an Apple stock price of $384.27! (at the current P/E of 18.69)
On an average, Apple has beaten the average earnings estimate by 20.3% during the previous four quarters. If Apple were to match this average, Apple could deliver whopping surprise earnings of $6.42. Imagine that! This will increase Apple's prior 12 months earnings to $21, or fetch an even higher Apple stock price of $392.49! (at the current P/E of 18.69)
Thus, we have three possibilities of where the Apple stock price could be post earnings:
1. $375.57 (for mean earnings of $5.52)
2. $384.27 (for analyst high earnings of $5.98)
3. $392.49 (for an Apple high earnings of $6.42)
Analysts are even more bullish
The mean target for Apple's 12 month price as per 46 analysts is $424.80, which is higher than all three possibilities above. The median is $440.00. The high target is $550.00, and the low target is $200.00. The high-low 12 month average target price is also $375.
Apple Price Target Summary
| Mean Target: | 424.80 |
|---|---|
| Median Target: | 440.00 |
| High Target: | 550.00 |
| Low Target: | 200.00 |
| No. of Brokers: | 46 |
Data provided by Thomson/First Call
Caveat: Stock Price Drops after earnings
Apple stock has not done well immediately after earnings announcement. On an average, Apple stock has actually dropped 4.48% post earnings during the previous four quarters, before it begins appreciating. This could mean that further downside to Apple stock is entirely possible after the earnings are announced this quarter. However, one can argue that Apple stock has already corrected significantly this quarter, and is priced for perfection post earnings to go up.
Where will Apple stock price end up after quarterly earnings call is anybody's guess... For instance, if Steve Jobs participates in the earnings call, the investors will welcome him and get excited about Apple's future. All eyes will be on the iPad 2 quarterly sales, Mac shipments, iPod sales, iPhone 4 growth and importantly, margins. If Apple were to hit a home run on all of these, Apple stock has nowhere to go, but up! We do know one thing for sure: At current price point of $335.06 as of Friday's close, Apple is quite undervalued! Even if the Apple stock remains undervalued and the P/E of 18.69 stays constant, it is reasonable to expect at least a 12% upside in the near term post earnings. $375 could be just round the corner!
How does Apple, the #1 innovative company in the world, innovate and create game-changing innovations such as the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad and more? What is Apple's secret recipe for innovation success?Download Apple's Innovation Strategy, and learn how Apple became the #1 innovator through:
• Creativity and Innovation
• Innovation in Products
• Innovation in Business Model
• Innovation in Customer Experience
• Innovation and Leadership
• Steve Jobs Visionary Leadership
Revised in 2011! Steve Jobs interview
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Entertainment Executive, Brian Altounian, Added as Speaker for Los Angeles Event.
Reinvention, Week 3: Seeking the Power Source
Since continuous "reinvention" has emerged as a hallmark of innovation in the 21st century (and I'm overdue for one), I'm in the process of attempting an actual reinvention. It's Week 3 with a new identity--which I'm calling the Warrior of Aliveness--and I've quickly realized that to think differently and be guided by a real shift of belief from within, I need fuel. I need to plug into some kind of power source befitting a Warrior to keep the process on track.
In my 20s, I remember reading the 20th century spiritual classic Autobiography of a Yogi, which introduced many westerners to eastern enlightenment through the life of Paramahansa Yogananda, the first yoga master of India to take up permanent residence in the West. Maybe, I thought, I needed to revisit Yogananda's wisdom to find a renewable power source.
I started by going to several yoga classes, which have generally revealed that I am pretty fat and lazy, with an unfocused mind that tends to drift and fall into its default, un-warrior-like patterns of distraction and complaints.
So to up the ante, I visited the local Kriya Yoga center here in Chicago to get some inspiration from Swami Kriyananda, the foremost living disciple of Yogananda. I was witness to a live feed via Skype of the old bearded man himself, who has many thousands of followers throughout the world. 
I listened intently to him for a message that could fuel me or at least steer me in the right direction. The Warrior within awoke as Kriyananda suggested that a life worth living is one in which you discover and pursue a mission worth dying for. You can't let yourself be limited by the "web of words," he said, referring to the cultural mindset around us. "Instead, create your own mantra."
Create my own mantras. Yes.
My inner guidance flickers and changes its message too often. Becoming a warrior is in large part mental, I know, and right now the natural "mantras" of my monkey mind are not empowering me. They change, they doubt. They point out how ridiculous I am. They sabotage with excuses and grievances that sound legitimate but do nothing to improve the quality of my life.
I know that to be equipped to battle for my own aliveness and the aliveness of others, I must think differently and be fueled by a different mindset. But, as Kriyananda reminded me, I have to create it. I have to choose this mindset. I have to rewrite my mental script in such a way that loose wiring becomes hard, and doubt insists on clarity. My power source must, at least in part, come from newly created mantras of my own design.
All right, Warrior, time to create.
Boomers vs. Gen Y…Who’s Winning in Corporate America?
O'Reilly Conference Tungsten Talks and Some Welcome Open Source Progress
- Curing Replication Deprivation with Tungsten -- A tutorial together with my colleague Ed Archibald. It covers everything you ever wanted to know about how to use parallel replication, handle multi-master/multi-source, replication to PostgreSQL/Oracle, etc. We will have a short section at the end about how to build full clusters with Tungsten Enterprise. Giuseppe Maxia is threatening to join and do some of his famous demos. Apparently doing a tutorial on replication in the morning is not enough to tire him out.
- Preparing for the Big Oops: How to Build Disaster Recovery Sites for MySQL -- Survey of methods as well as things to have in mind when building a disaster recovery site. This will cover everything I can think of, not just Tungsten.