Operations in Amazon's Northern Virginia cloud computing data center were disrupted during a five-hour period Wednesday.

Users of the Amazon EC2 cloud with workloads in Amazon's Northern Virginia data center experienced problems early Wednesday morning, with some operations in a part of the data center interrupted during a five-hour period.

Amazon didn't name the location of the facility, but Amazon Web Services is known to operate a data center near McLean, Va. Amazon posted a set of one-line status reports on the incident on its Service Health Dashboard as it sought to restore customer workloads after an apparent power outage. 

The status reports first stated that Amazon was "investigating connectivity issues" in its East-1 region at 4:08 a.m. Eastern. "We are experiencing power issues for a subset of instances" it reported at 4:26 a.m. Then at 4:51 a.m. it reported that "the underlying power issue has been addressed. Instances have begun to recover."

What's in a name?  

Recently, we been getting a lot of questions regarding our name...  What does it mean?  Where does it come from?  How much are your sandal wood incense sticks? Well, we're not a holistic health center, first of all.  What we are, though, is a way for businesses to learn about how SaaS and web based software can help take their business to the next level.  How you ask?  Well, to put it in a nutshell, SaaS takes the complicated world of custom programmed, self-supported, enterprise software and it makes it SIMPLE.  I won't go into a litany of why or how in this post, but believe me when I say that if you're up for the change-management, replacing all your on-premise software systems with SaaS will make your life more simple.  Hence the name: DreamSimplicity...

The fact that you're reading this blog is a step in the right direction, but in addition to learning about SaaS at DreamSimplicity.com, I would highly encourage you to visit the Software & Information Industry Association's (SIIA) website to learn more.  Not only do they have a host of information pertaining to software and SaaS, but they also hold frequent events in various locations where you can learn about and see SaaS in action first hand.  Coming up at the end of this month is one of SIIA's semi-annual OnDemand conferences being held right here in our back yard in San Jose.  One of the reasons I'm most excited to attend is the great speaker line up.  They truly have put together an A-list speaker panel with pillars of industry like Zach Nelson of NetSuite, Lars Dalgaard of SuccessFactors and Michael Lock of Google Enterprise.  Additionally, there will be a number of up-and-coming SaaS companies there to get a glimpse of things to come in the world of SaaS.