Data Center Reading: Monday Links

Why did the routing snafu affect some providers and not others? "As it turns out, the reason for all those routing resets and general instability was due to a previously unknown Cisco bug involving AS paths close to 255 in length," reports Earl Zmijewski of Renesys. "If you try to prepend to a long path that you receive and by doing so, create a path longer than 255, you are toast."

At InformationWeek, John Foley writes about the failure of cloud computing platform Coghead, noting that customers now must shift applications from Coghead's Adobe Flex-based platform to another PaaS provider or bring them in-house. "Customers can take the XML out that describes their application, but the reality is that it only runs on Coghead, so customers will need to rewrite their app with something different," Coghead CEO Paul McNamara said.

At CIO, Michael Bullock writes about the "power density paradox" of data center growth. "As you increase power density in your data center, your need for support space will increase disproportionately," he writes. "In other words, your efforts to free up space in your data center could boomerang, creating an even greater space crisis than you had before."

Pingdom looks at six recent cases of "sysadmins gone wild" in which data center employees face allegations of having attempted to sabotage services.