I am busy designing and building  infrastructure for various “as a Service” service offerings

Web as a Service (IIS)
Data as a Service (SQL and Oracle)
Middleware as a Service

So I thought I would float a few questions

What is High Availability?
When do you need it?
How do you create it?
How do you measure it?

DISCUSS !!

[UPDATE]

Here is my two penneth,

Life is full of tools, tips, tricks and technology. However most people fail on the “When to” and “When NOT to” use a particular piece of technology.

For example you would not use a pair of scissors to cut the lawn, or a lawn mower for a hair cut , yet they are both cutting / triming devices !

So why it is we see some people use a full on SQL database to manage the population of a TEN item drop down box and other use MSAccess (and the MSACCESS GUI not a web app) to run a million pound revneue generating mission critical business application for 100 users over 20 sites

I read an article some while ago about the police had just caught on to the fact the sat navs area good place to “hide” SD or other small memory cards, will the sorn off USB cable is even better

Hide a ultra small USB stick inside a broken USB cable, and who is even going to try and plug it in

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/04/17/sawed_off_usb_key/

Just in case any one wondered what I actually do for a living, I build world class web hosting platforms. We are talking up to a Terabyte of content and 8-10 Million hits per day. So when a friend of a friend said he was having trouble with a site getting 190,000 hit per day, i did a detailed analysis and made some recomendations.

 Then I hear they have been and done something completely different, and possibly daft.

 Well I say good luck to him

I am slowing gaining some good experience in coding with visual studio 2008 and VB.NET and some C# for ASP.NET

But I fell into a corker this week

I have a simple form with a dropdown list box, the items in this drop down list box are populated from a data string obtained from an external webservice during the page load, Nice solutions or so I thought

1st problem a page load occurs during a post back, so the dropdown list was getting populated twice, once during the initial page load, and AGAIN during a validation post back on a textbox

So I decided to clear the dropdown list before adding the items

Some hours of frustration later I discovered the clearing and reloading the list items was not such a good plan, Pageload also goes off during a form submission which then nukes the selectedvalue data for the dropdown list

End result, test the dropdown list item count before to see if I have already added any item, of not add them

Sorted
1. My selected values work properly
2. My postbacks are quicker as the webservices call only occurs on initial load

Sat in a Server 2008 session at the UK 2008 product launch,

and they have just announced “Hyper-V goes RC0 today”

Just been pondering the internet and downloads etc and this news item sprung to mind www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/22/burnham_dcms_filesharing/  in which the government are threatening to put legislation so that ISPs stop their customers taking part in illegal downloads. This is like asking the police to stop every drink driver by stopping every vehicle on a busy motorway and breath testing every driver and all the passengers just to be sure.

The ISPs cant even do a decent job of stopping SPAM either from or to their networks, what chance to they stand of stopping peer2peer activities.

My son got a copy of the Nintendo DS transformers game for XMAS, and decided to try out the WiFi features over the weekend.
I had heard the some WiFi routers and access point do not work well as the DS wireless if not fully WiFi compliant. They aren’t kidding, more like not RFC compliant in many areas.
NO support for NON wep security
A TCP/IP stack that does not confirm it has taken the DHCP address it was offered and then does not respond to ping, instead it just uses it and says nothing, so the next new device connects to the network, gets the same address, and the DS gets kicked off,

This make an intersting read

HOW TO: wordpress on IIS7 with some extras too

http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2007/08/12/IIS-Authentication-plugin-for-the-WordPress-PHP-blogging-engine.aspx

Well after waiting 3 weeks by FON router (with optional 7dB antenna) finally arrived on Friday

Much to my surprise, it did the business straight out of the box

Plugged it in to my network and away it went (using the serial no for the private network WPA key)

Logged into the FON web site via the FON_AP public WiFi configure the location and that is it done, the FON locate WiFi maps now shows my house as a FON node.
Jobs a good’n