“Are you on the business side or the IT side?” was a question I received maybe a half dozen times last month while I was attending the Disaster Recovery Journal Fall World in San Diego.  This question really got me thinking—everyone at the conference worked in business continuity (BC) and/or disaster recovery (DR), but there was a definite divide between those who reported into IT departments and those who reported into the business. For the most part, these divisions fell along the lines of those who reported into IT had a DR focus and those who reported into the business (or perhaps into security and risk) had a BC focus. Attending the different breakout sessions across both domains I noted the good news: both groups speak the same language: RTO, RPO, availability, downtime, resilience, etc. The bad news is that I’m not sure we’re all using the same dictionary.

Two of the business-focused sessions I attended pointed out a troubling difference in the way IT and the business interpret one of the simplest of BC/DR terms: RTO. What is RTO? Simply put, it is the time to recover a service after an outage. This seems straightforward enough, but let’s breaks out how a business and an IT professional might understand RTO:

• Business: The maximum amount of time that my service can be unavailable.
• IT: The amount of time it takes to recover that service.

This week Amazon Web Services announced a new pricing tier for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service and in doing so has differentiated its offering even further. At first blush the free tier sounds like a free trial, which isn't anything new in cloud computing. True, the free tier is time-limited, but you get 12 months, and capacity limited, along multiple dimensions. But it's also a new pricing band. And for three of its services, SimpleDB, Simple Queueing Service (SQS), and Simple Notification Service (SNS) the free tier is indefinite. Look for Amazon to lift the 12 month limit on this service next October, because the free tier will drive revenues for AWS long term. Here's why:

A few weeks back I posted a story about how one of our clients has been turning cloud economics to their advantage by flipping the concept of capacity planning on its head. Their strategy was to concentrate not on how much capacity they would need when their application got hot, but on how they could reduce its capacity footprint when it wasn't. As small as they could get it, they couldn't shrink it to the point where they incurred no cost at all; they were left with at least a storage and a caching bill. Now with the free tier, they can achieve a no-cost footprint. 

It’s been a few weeks since the extravaganza that was Oracle Open World 2010, and I wanted to post a few words about what I came away thinking.  Aside from the genuine America's Cup guarded by large men with earphones and white gloves, BMX stunts on closed San Francisco streets, Oktoberfest and the Black Eyed Peas, Don Henley and The Steve Miller Band, I’d have to call the event, well, slightly understated. Admittedly, I don’t know much about the world of middleware, so the big ticket product launch of Exalogic was largely lost on me, although it may well be a huge deal to those in the know. There was drama with Mark Hurd’s appearance after his recent hiring; Larry’s never been one to avoid stepping on toes so he was willing to antagonize a huge partner that shared the stage on his keynote. This Oracle/HP friction is an unavoidable reality of the era of co-opetition as Oracle transitions from being a software company that partners with hardware companies to becoming a one stop shop and a competitor to those partners. In fact it’s pretty similar to the dissing of NetApp, EMC and HDS that Larry doled out last year when he announced Exadata, but HP looked better in that round as they were the hardware partner before the Sun acquisition. Did you think Larry was going to become a hardware vendor without burning (or at least heating up) some bridges with partners?

Look past the hoopla and what struck me was the laser focus that Oracle is showing as they transform themselves into a true IT mega-vendor with the world’s leading database at its core. Here are some of the most striking elements of this as I see it:

Being an infrastructure & operations (I&O) professional is tough. How do we know? Because you tell us in the nearly 5,000 inquiries the I&O team does each year. We hear your challenges on server, storage, and network technologies. We field concerns on whether you should buy, build, lease, or forgo a datacenter altogether. We get tough questions on mobile devices and how to empower your users. Not to mention all of the “O” challenges around IT service management, asset management, ITIL adoption. The list literally goes on and on. I&O consumes nearly half of the overall IT operating budget – so it comes with a broad set of responsibilities.

That’s why I’m excited to announce a new way for you to get your tough I&O challenges solved: Your peers. Starting today, Forrester is launching an online community for infrastructure & operations professionals. It’s a premier destination for leaders to exchange ideas, opinions, and real-world solutions to the myriad of I&O responsibilities. Of course, Forrester analysts will be part of the community as well. But our goal is to facilitate the discussion and share our views. This is the place for you to hear from your peers, not just Forrester.

We’re also committed to connecting you with as many I&O pros as possible, so the community is open to all I&O readers — not just clients.

Here’s what you’ll find:

• A simple platform on which you can pose your questions and get advice from peers who face the same business or technology challenges.
• Insight from our analysts, who weigh in frequently on the issues and point to relevant research.