Top 10 continuity tips

Organisations must ensure that data is secured, protected and brought back online instantaneously in the event of a natural or man-made disaster, according to Computer Technology Review.

The online publication gives its "Top 10" list of recommendations to ensure that businesses and large organisations have implemented thorough procedures to ensure IT business continuity in the event of any type of system outage.

The list puts identifying business critical data and systems within the company and performing a business impact analysis and cost implications of a disaster recovery plan as the most critical aspects.

Sun Microsystems plans to sell a data centre packaged in a stackable shipping container, CNET News reports.

The company unveiled "Project Blackbox", which tucks several racks of computing gear, along with the necessary power and cooling equipment, into a standard shipping container.

Sun believes the technology will appeal to customers who are running out of space in their current data centres, providing backup computing gear for disaster recovery services.

US Department of Energy and University of Chicago researchers have demonstrated a new specialised software system that quickly provides computational resources for emergency applications, Continuity Central reports.

The new system, called SPRUCE (Special PRiority and Urgent Computing Environment), supports urgent computing on both traditional supercomputers and distributed computational grids.

The system provides users with "right-of-way" tokens applicable to a select set of computer resources and urgency levels. During an emergency, a token can be activated either automatically via Web services or manually from a Web-based portal.