Posts tagged storage service
Practically Speaking about Amazon Web Services – Part 2: A Cloud Giant
Sep 1st
Practically Speaking about Amazon Web Services – Part 2: A Cloud Giant
We saw the various innovative cloud products and services offered by Amazon Web Services in Part 1. At this stage, it is quite natural that we have the business economics going on in our mind as how big is the cloud business industry and what part is being played by Amazon. Let us have a look at how Amazon Web Services has fared in analysts views. After all, before Amazon Web Services came along, Amazon was the least known for putting up a fight with IT Giants: such as: Microsoft, IBM, Google etc., where they not?
IDC, in a press release dated June 23rd,2010, says that global revenue of public cloud services which was around $ 16 Billion in 2009 will grow to $ 55.5 Billion in 2014. The research report further states that IT cloud services are crossing the chasm with modest revenue; fastest growth of about CAGR 27.4%.
-Reference: Worldwide and Regional Public IT Cloud Services 2010–2014 Forecast by IDC – (IDC #223549)
Another report released by UBS Investment Research analysts Brian Pitz and Brian Fitzgerald says that, for the type of cloud services offered by Amazon Web Services the market size can be pegged at around $ 15 to 20 Billion in the year 2014.
As per analysts, Amazon Web Services clocked revenue of about $ 0.5 Billion in 2010; could go up to $ 2.54 Billion in 2014. And this is about a 5% of total market share! And a market share of about 15% in similar services! Analysts predict that from the last quarter of 2010, Amazon Web Services revenue will have an impact on Amazon Inc., as a company. Well, not minding accuracy of these market share figures, one can clearly say that Amazon is an early pioneer player poised to grow big.
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Top 30 Cloud Service Providers Gaining Mind Share in 3Q 2010
Aug 31st
Top 30 Cloud Service Providers Gaining Mind Share
Article by: Ray DePena with Cloud Expo
Image Credit to incomingit.com
It has certainly been an exciting week in the Cloudsphere with Dell and HP battling it out over 3PAR. It’s clear who is on Dell and HP’s radar, and I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of 2010 Cloud acquisitions as the segment continues to consolidate.
Its been almost 2 quarters since the last report, though the BTC Logic team has done an excellent job in their Top Ten Cloud Companies in 2Q10 Report to pick up the slack. CRN released The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors list joining the The Top 150 Players in Cloud Computing, 85 Cloud Computing Vendors Shaping the Emerging Cloud, 50 of The Biggest and Best Cloud Computing Companies, The VAR Guy’s SaaS 20 Index, and even Congress has gotten into the Cloud game – Congress Holds Hearing on Cloud Computing.
With that M&A activity as background, here are my rankings for the Top 30 Cloud Service Providers Gaining Mind Share in 3Q 2010.
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Amazon CloudFront Updates New Feature
Aug 6th
We are excited to inform you about a new feature we’ve recently added to Amazon CloudFront, AWS’s easy to use content delivery network. You now have the ability to assign a default root object to your HTTP or HTTPS distribution. This default object will be served when Amazon CloudFront receives a request for the root of your distribution i.e., your distributions domain name by itself. To utilize this new functionality, you will need to enable it for your existing distribution. For instance, you might assign index.html to be the file that CloudFront would serve whenever it receives a request for your distribution without an object name specified.
This new feature will make it easier for you to serve all of your static content from edge locations close to your end users and provide them with a better experience. There are no extra charges for using this new feature beyond Amazon CloudFront’s normal rates for data transfer and requests. You can read more about the default root object feature in the Amazon CloudFront Developer Guide.
About Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront is a web service for content delivery. It integrates with other Amazon Web Services to give developers and businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments.
Amazon CloudFront delivers your static and streaming content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your objects are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance. Amazon CloudFront works seamlessly with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) which durably stores the original, definitive versions of your files. Like other Amazon Web Services, there are no contracts or monthly commitments for using Amazon CloudFront – you pay only for as much or as little content as you actually deliver through the service.
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10 Very Popular Cloud Storage Service Must Haves For Businesses!
Aug 4th
10 Popular Cloud Storage Services
The focus is on Storage rather than the whole Infrastructure or Platform itself. Some of these companies you may or may not be familiar with. We feel it’s a good list of some newer and some older services!
Updated: Aug 5th, 2010
ZumoDrive is a cloud-based file synchronization and storage service. The service enables users to store and sync files online and between computers using their HybridCloud storage solution.ZumoDrive has a cross-platform client between (Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and Palm webOS)
Carbonite’s online backup service works quietly and continually in the background protecting your files. If something goes wrong or you delete a file by accident, we’ve still got a copy. Carbonite Online Backup now includes remote file access! Retrieve files you have backed up with Carbonite from any computer with an internet connection.
HostedFTP currently uses Amazon S3 to store customer files and Amazon EC2 to host their website and database. In addition, they use Amazon EC2’s EBS (Elastic Block Store) to manage their codebase. This system allows them to quickly deploy new versions of their software with zero downtime and without having to create new EC2 machine images.
Wuala is a free secure online storage which allows its users to securely store, backup, and access files from anywhere and to share files easily with friends, groups, and the world. Tens of thousands of users and thousands of communities around the world are already actively sharing millions of files, growing quickly.
Egnyte delivers an all-in-one file server solution that combines unlimited, on-demand file storage and workgroup collaboration capabilities with an automated, online backup. Egnyte has versions for both Windows and Mac, and is aimed at the small business/home office market.
CloudBerry Online Backup provides a powerful Backup and Restore program designed to leverage Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure storage to make your disaster recovery plan simple, reliable, and affordable. The product is one time fee and you pay storage charges to Amazon directly.
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Mezeo Software Announces Partnership With CTERA Networks at HostingCon 2010
Jul 20th
CTERA Networks’ Mezeo Ready Appliances Enable Affordable Hybrid Cloud/On-Premises Storage, Sharing and Backup for Mid-Size Organizations
AUSTIN, TX–(Marketwire – July 20, 2010) – Mezeo Software™ (www.mezeo.com), the leading provider of a deployable cloud storage platform for service providers, today announced the addition of CTERA™ Networks (www.ctera.com) as a Mezeo Ready Solution Partner. The announcement was made at HostingCon 2010, which runs through July 21 at the Austin Convention Center. Mezeo is exhibiting in Booth 337.
Mezeo Ready service providers can now extend their cloud offerings with CTERA’s Cloud Attached Storage solution, which uses customer premises appliances as cloud gateways for backup and remote access services managed via the CTERA Portal. The CTERA CloudPlug™, ideal for single office, home office and branch locations, is a small plug computing device that transforms any USB or eSATA hard drive into network-attached storage (NAS) with integrated online backup. As a Mezeo Ready solution, the CTERA CloudPlug and CTERA’s larger 2-bay appliance, the CTERA C200, seamlessly connect a user’s local network to Mezeo-based storage clouds for secure remote file sharing, synchronization and remote access.
“The growing virtual workforce and the constant need for service providers to deliver value-added services to users have put secure remote file access, storage and backup capabilities on center stage,” said Steve Lesem, President and CEO of Mezeo Software. “CTERA delivers much needed reliability and storage flexibility to the SMB market via elegant and easy-to-install appliances, making them an ideal Mezeo Ready partner.”
The event exhibits open on Tuesday, July 20, and attendees can stop by Mezeo booth 337 to see a demonstration of the CTERA CloudPlug.
“CTERA has designed its technology to cater to the operational needs of service providers while supporting a heterogeneous cloud infrastructure, so we are excited to team with Mezeo Software, who is also a leader in this space,” said Liran Eshel, CEO of CTERA Networks. ”The CTERA and Mezeo solution provides mid-market-focused service providers a seamless and affordable cloud storage solution for their customers.”
Launched in June, the Mezeo Ready Program is designed to make it easier for customers and service providers to find and deploy Mezeo Ready solutions. The Mezeo Ready community is comprised of a wide-range of service providers, developers, cloud gateway providers and technology partners all focused on delivering Mezeo enabled cloud storage solutions.
With Mezeo, IT Service Providers can rapidly monetize Storage as a Service with a branded offering, and large enterprises can implement a secure, private cloud with clients for BlackBerry,® iPhone, Windows desktop and the Web. Mezeo features end-to-end encryption, advanced file sharing and collaboration, content tagging and access anywhere with white label Web 2.0, Windows® desktop, and iPhone and BlackBerry® native clients. Mezeo is easy to deploy, multi-tenant, and highly scalable and secure, with REST Web Services APIs for platform extensibility.
Follow Mezeo on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mezeo.
To sign up for the monthly Cloud Storage Strategy newsletter and download the Cloud Storage Business Model Toolkit, go to www.cloudstoragestrategy.com/model.
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Pitting Cloud against Cloud
Jul 15th
Tools that benchmark performance promise to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of competing cloud providers.
New software developed to measure the performance of different cloud computing platforms could make it easier for prospective users to figure out which of these increasingly popular services is right for them.
Right now, developers have little means of comparing cloud providers, which lease access to computing power based in vast and distant data centers. Until actually migrating their software to a cloud service, they can’t know exactly how fast that service will perform calculations, retrieve data, or respond to sudden spikes in demand. But Duke University computer scientist Xiaowei Yang and her colleague Ang Li are trying to make the cloud market more like the car market, where, as Yang says, “you can compare specifications like engine size or top speed.”
Working with Srikanth Kandula and Ming Zhang of Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, Yang and Li have developed a suite of benchmarking tools that make it possible to compare the performance of different cloud platforms without moving applications between them. These tools use algorithms to measure the speed of computation, and shuttle data around to test the speed at which new copies of an application are created, the speed at which data can be stored and retrieved, the speed at which it can be shuttled between applications inside the same cloud, and the responsiveness of a cloud to network requests from distant places. The researchers used the software to test the services offered by six providers: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, GoGrid, RackSpace and CloudSites. Results of those tests were combined with the providers’ pricing models to allow for quick comparisons.
The results are among the first attempts to compare the performance of several clouds platforms, says Yang. “We found that it’s very hard to find a provider that is best in all metrics,” she says. “Some are twice as fast for just 10 percent extra cost, which is a very good deal, but at the same time their storage service is actually very slow and has a lot of latency variation.” Another provider showed good computation speeds but was less quick at spawning new instances of an application–something that might be necessary for a service that experiences peaks in demand, as a video site does when some of its content goes viral. “It seems like in today’s market it is hard to pick a provider that is good at everything,” says Yang.
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Verizon to launch cloud storage service – Who’s next?
Jun 15th
The carrier will put storage facilities in large data centers around its global IP network as a draw for large enterprises to subscribe
Verizon Business is set to announce a cloud-based storage service on Tuesday, leveraging the formidable Verizon Communications global data network as a draw for large enterprises to subscribe.
Starting in October, the company will launch storage facilities at Verizon data centers around the world. These facilities will be provided by cloud storage provider Nirvanix but will be located in the carrier’s data centers, on its global IP network, said Patrick Verhoeven, manager of cloud services product marketing.
Verizon will get started on the offering in July by using Nirvanix’s Storage Delivery Network, which is used for services sold wholesale by providers like Verizon. The five Nirvanix facilities will remain part of the offering, providing local access to storage in specific cities for customers that need it, Verizon said.
Many players are diving into the cloud-based storage business even as enterprises approach the concept warily because of worries about security, reliability and getting their data back. Storage vendors such as EMC have joined Amazon.com’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) unit in building such offerings. Verizon said it can offer better value and faster access by combining network services with the storage capacity, all on a pay-as-you-go basis. The carrier already has a cloud backup service for transactional data, called Managed Data Vault. The new offering is designed more for unstructured data, according to Verizon.
Continue Reading… Full Credit to: InfoWorld
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Cloud Computing Review – Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud review
May 10th
If you’re building an internal or private cloud, Canonical wants you to use Ubuntu Linux 10.04 as your operating system of choice. To that end, the newest version of Ubuntu includes a feature set called Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.
In keeping with its open source pedigree, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud is integrated with the open source Eucalyptus private cloud platform, making it possible to create a private cloud with much less configuration than installing Linux first, then Eucalyptus.
And for those thinking about eventually moving resources to the public cloud, or simply bursting to the public cloud when workloads spike, the Ubuntu/Eucalyptus internal cloud offering is designed to be compatible with Amazon’s EC2 public cloud service.
On the flip side, you’ll need to familiarise yourself with both Ubuntu and Eucalyptus, as Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud’s dependence on Eucalyptus will force you to reach beyond Ubuntu documentation when problems occur. For example, we found Ubuntu had weak documentation for customising images, an important step in deploying Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.
Basically, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud can be deployed on internal hardware to run job/batch applications. The idea is to initially allocate storage, then rapidly build multiple virtual machines to process data, collect the data, then tear down the infrastructure for re-use by a subsequent purpose.
Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud provides internal cloud control methods that closely mime what can be done on Amazon’s public cloud infrastructure. Its tools can be used to process recurring jobs or one-shot distributed applications, like DNA analysis, video rendering, or database table reformatting/reindexing.
Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud uses the open source kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) platform to host virtual machines that run on the backend nodes. This is important because there are extra Eucalyptus-provided images that include both the KVM and Xen kernels, but you must use the KVM ones if you’re importing them into Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.
Getting started
In order to successfully run Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, we had to have at least two dedicated systems. One is used for the front-end applications, which include a Cloud Controller, a Cluster Controller, Walrus Controller and the Storage Controller. The other system became a node machine that ran the hosted virtual machines.
The controller services were easy to understand since they’re similar to Amazon EC2 Cloud components. The Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Cloud Controller is the front-end service application — the one to connect to for managing cloud services. It understands EC2 API calls, and offered us its web user interface.
The Cluster Controller, in turn, manages each cluster of node (VM) resources, and talks to the node/VM host via the open source libvrt library. We could use as many nodes as we had hardware resources to cram them into, Canonical recommends baseline hardware and recommends faster components, even down to disk speed.
The Walrus Controller acts as a storage mechanism like Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) for data storage or storing VM images. The Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Storage Controller, like Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS), makes persistent virtual disks to attach to running instances — active resource storage virtualisation control. Each cluster can have a Storage Controller for the convenience of management, snapshots, object aggregation, and so on.
Continue the review at: TechWorld
