[saahne]

If you are a small or medium sized business there might be a certain appeal in such a system as you are out-sourcing a lot of your IT costs. That's the pitch anyway. Last Month Microsoft announced hosted Exchange services. Microsoft also has LiveMesh .

Microsoft is building huge server farms to support it's cloud infrastructure.

Microsoft hasn't disclosed its total number of servers, but Chrapaty [Microsoft's corporate vice president of Global Foundation Services] told the MMS audience that the company's infrastructure is growing by 10,000 servers per month. Here's some context for that number: Last week we noted that Facebook now has 10,000 servers powering its platform. That means that every month Microsoft is essentially adding a Facebook worth of servers. Chrapaty predicted that Microsoft's growth will accelerate to 20,000 servers per month in the next several years.

BTW Getting your data stuck in the Cloud can be a right pain. Yesterday I got an error message when I went to my Google Docs account. I didn't think much of it as I rarely use Google Docs but today the tech press is reporting that Google had a fairly substantial outage yesterday that made life a real misery for some.

Several Google users, some of them paying customers, found themselves knocked out of Google Apps and Gmail after an "access issue" knocked out the company's software as a service suite for 15 hours.