As HP Heads To The Cloud, It May Need An Umbrella

Hewlett-Packard clearly will spend a chunk of the $1 billion investment in infrastructure that it announced this week on a drive to become a cloud computing provider, seeing what many believe is writing on the wall that the cloud is the can't-miss business opportunity of a generation.

The folks at HP, though, might want to put in a call to the people at Hosting.com, which provides cloud hosting infrastructure, to see what may be in store. According to Apparent Networks, which tracks performance of cloud infrastructure providers, Tuesday wasn't the best of days for Hosting.com:

"Apparent Networks' Cloud Performance Center (www.apparentnetworks.com/cpc) recently confirmed Hosting.com experienced connectivity loss which caused an outage in their Newark, New Jersey, data center," Apparent reports. "The outage occurred on June 1, 2010, beginning at approximately 15:45PM and ending 8:29PM EDT. There were intermittent periods of connectivity with high data packet loss between those times, and the number of connectivity loss events and duration varied slightly by location. According to Hosting.com's Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/HDCOps), "One dedicated switch failed. It failed over to a second switch which crashed as well."

Oops.

A peek over at Hosting.com's Twitter page reveals that, as of Wednesday night, folks at the company were still working to figure out what went wrong:

"Regrouping with engineering to discuss next steps. Traffic ramping up. Presently stable. Monitoring closely."

And then:

"Continuing to investigate crashinfo files. Now attempting to replicate operating circumstances in our lab."

Hosting.com reported that a switch crashed, a backup switch crashed, and discussions with Cisco pointed to an undisclosed software bug.

Hosting.com, according to its Web site, hosts 65,000 Web sites and has five data centers in Irvine, Calif.; Denver; Louisville, Ky; Newark, N.J.; and San Francisco. Its Newark data center, which suffered the outage, appears to be well-built.

To be clear, a 45-minute outage is not long. But for some small businesses, it could be enough to wipe out a month's profit.

The cloud infrastructure business is not for the faint of heart. If you read the quarterly reports of publicly traded hosting and cloud companies, they tend to be heavy on debt, under pressure to constantly upgrade data centers (those three-year refresh cycles come pretty fast when you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on servers), and feeling the pinch of pricing compression. Add to that the 24x7x365 pressure of maintaining reliability, performance and uptime, and you've got some corporate executives who might have trouble sleeping at night.

If any company can handle a big-time investment in enterprise and development of a cloud business, it's HP. But if it's grown itself into the largest technology company in the world through engineering, it's going to need that great engineering to make a cloud infrastructure business work the way it's hoping.