The roll out of the National Broadband Network is set to revolutionise the way Australians communicate, but it has raised questions about the reliability of the network compared with existing copper-based telephone systems, especially among non-technical people.

Amazon Web Services has added a new high-availability feature called Multi-Availability Zone (Multi-AZ) to its cloud-based Relational Database Service (RDS), the company said on Tuesday.

The release of the first beta of version 9.1 of the open source PostgreSQL database has opened a new era in enterprise-class reliability and data integrity that can compete with the big names, say its developers.

CIOs looking to find a reliable cloud provider should seek one whose service has already fallen over, according to Dan Foody, vice president at Web services management provider Progress Actional.