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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The Texas secretary of state's office has cut short its relationship with IBM (www.ibm.com) after it allegedly failed to protect state information under an $863 million data center consolidation contract, according to a report from the Austin American-Statesman.
A server crash in August led to a 13-day outage of the agency's business records filing system. This incident signaled the secretary of state to serious weaknesses in IBM's ability to recover lost data, secretary of state spokesman Randall Dillard told the American-Statesman. "We couldn't allow the ability to conduct fair, credible elections to be jeopardized," Dillard said.
Dillard and other worry that had a similar failure affected Texas' voter registration data during an election, the state's counties would not be able to verify new voters. In its place, the secretary of state's office is electing to set up its own $7.9 million data operation, which includes two separate backup locations, payed for by federal government funds that pay for the mandated state-wide voter registration system.
The report notes that not only has the secretary of state expressed frustration with the project, but also the majority of the 27 agencies involved in the data center consolidation. According to a poll taken in the spring, 88 percent of the agencies' IT directors were dissatisfied with the services provided by IBM.
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Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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