Windows Live users suffer outage

Users of Hotmail, Xbox Live and other Windows Live services experienced an outage lasting about an hour on Tuesday, 15 February, reports LA Times.

According to Microsoft, the outage, which started at about 9am PST, was due to the loss of a server. As more requests directed to that server piled up, the extra load landed on the company's other servers, causing the outage. Microsoft says it replaced the troublesome server within an hour.

The outage was first noticed by Twitter users who tweeted about not being able to access their Windows Live services. Microsoft acknowledged the outage on its Twitter profile first and followed with a blog post, saying it plans to "fully investigate the cause and will take steps to prevent this from happening again".

Messaging solutions vendor Teneros has unveiled its' DR-as-a-service' offering, a hosted solution for critical network and communication applications such as Microsoft Exchange, BlackBerry, Active Directory, and DNS, states eChannelLine.

The new service provides application-aware DR across three components of enterprise DR planning: network, communication, and information.

"Teneros has been a message infrastructure provider especially around Exchange, the idea being that messaging applications were always on and always available," says Michael Guglielmi, Teneros vice-president of business development.

The top three data storage priorities for 2010 are data backup (48%), adding capacity (37%), and disaster recovery (36%), writes TechTarget.

This is according to enterprise data storage managers responding to SearchStorage.com's Storage Priorities for 2010 survey. In fact, in the three years of running the survey, those have been among the top three priorities for each coming year.

As storage managers begin to dig themselves out of a blizzard of lousy economic news, they're likely to find themselves facing the same capacity demands that shaped their plans before their budgets went into the deep freeze.