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You SLA me!

Posted on 28 Apr 2009 at 11:02

Jon Honeyball wonders where in the world his data is stored, and David Moss continues his mission to get a course management system up and running.

Now I have to ask, is this really the sort of contract you want to have in place for your core email infrastructure? The one you run your business through now that email is quite rightly viewed as being a "mission critical" service? I have serious doubts about that, and my concerns aren't new. I asked Microsoft for a comment regarding the forthcoming Azure Cloud services platform, about whether it was possible to ensure that my data could be held entirely and solely within the territory of the EU, and that under no circumstances would it ever get transmitted or moved or "failed over" to the Oregon datacenter. For example, I might be doing perfectly legitimate trade with a country that America disapproves of, and I really wouldn't want the FBI trawling through my Cloud datacenter files if the VMs and SQL storage objects "accidentally" happened to end up in the wrong country.

The response, which I quote here in full, was this: "Microsoft will follow any laws that are applicable to our service, including US laws. In addition, we expect our subscribers to follow the laws applicable to them as well, and we have explained that data may be stored in the US in order to help them determine what their legal obligations are.

"As to whether a particular fact scenario is or is not legally permitted, we cannot give subscribers legal advice - they will need to consult with their own attorneys. The cross-border nature of a cloud service will raise legal issues in some situations, and in those particular situations it may be better for the customer to use an on-premise solution." Frankly, this is a total mess.

As things stand I have serious concerns about the business viability of Microsoft's Cloud computing offerings (and other vendors too - this isn't a Microsoft-only issue) and I think that appropriate levels of risk analysis need to be applied before anyone signs up for anything of this sort. I'm prepared to live with the fact that Microsoft accepts no liability for the software I use in my daily business, but at least I have physical access to that solution and can ensure that I have appropriate levels of backup, recovery and DR both for the service itself and the integrity of the data. These Cloud service solutions are currently falling woefully short of what I need to see before I'll commit business-critical data to them. Okay, it's still early days, but naivety is no more acceptable from the vendors than it is from potential service users.

Jon Honeyball

MySQL graphics

Welcome back to the continuing saga of my attempt to get a Course Management System up and running on Windows Server 2008. So far I've installed Internet Information Services 7, PHP Hypertext Processor (PHP) and MySQL. The next job is to sort out some graphical tools to work with MySQL, and fortunately these are available from the same place I got MySQL. Visit www.pcpro/links/176serv2 for the MySQL GUI Tools Downloads page, which gives you access to a single download that contains the following tools:

??MySQL Administrator 1.2

??MySQL Query Browser 1.2

??MySQL Migration Toolkit 1.1

For Windows there are two versions, one with an installer and one where you simply unzip the contents. It's entirely up to you which one you choose, but for reporting purposes I chose the one with the built-in installer, which at the time of writing was version 5.0-r16 for Windows (there are different version numbers for different operating systems). Once downloaded I ran the installation, which provided me with the usual welcoming splash screen, followed it up with a licence agreement with Sun Microsystems, and then showed me the installation path, which is of course modifiable to anywhere you might prefer. Then you get the option for a complete installation or a custom job. I took a peek at Custom to see what I'd have got with the complete installation, and that turned out to be a set of common components, the three MySQL GUI tools listed earlier, and language support for German, Greek, Japanese, Polish, and Portuguese from Brazil. Make your choices and hit Install.