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Amazon AWS, Cloud Services, Cloud Storage, Microsoft

Amazon and Microsoft Bring Public Cloud Storage to a New Level

Microsoft announced last week that Azure Premium Storage would soon become widely available. The week before this announcement, Amazon launched their Elastic File System, a new public storage cloud, at the AWS Summit. Both of these have helped the adoption of using the cloud.

 

Public storage is usually available in one of three types. Object storage is exposed via standard REST APIs to store and retrieve data. Block storage files are attached to a VM and then become available as local disks. Lastly, archival storage is an alternative to tape-based backing systems. This type of storage is used to store data that is not accessed very often. These three storage types address specific situations, but the network file share equal on the public cloud is missing from the equation.

 

Amazon’s Elastic File System (EFS) provides multiple E2 instances with low-latency, shared access to file systems. EFS provides flexible capacity that adjusts as files are added or removed and is accessible from both Microsoft Windows and Linus operating systems. Because it is available as a multi-user, shared service, it is being backed up with SSD-based storage. The data is copied over multiple zones for redundancy and availability. EFS integrates with Amazon’s security model based on Identity and Access Management (IAM) and VPC security groups. Managers can use standard file and directory permissions to control who can access the systems.

 

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Before this service, customers had to set up dedicated file servers, and this extra step resulted in higher operating and maintenance costs. With EFS, customers get a managed file sharing service backed by SLA, and they only pay for what they use each month. Amazon is charging $0.30 per GB per month, which is 10 times more expensive than Amazon S3 which costs $0.03 per GB per month (excluding access charges and bandwidth). However, while the data stored in S3 can be accessed from any application, the data stored on EFS is available only to those applications running in Amazon EC2. EFS is also primarily meant for administration and management.

 

Amazon is not the first to offer a shared file system like this. Microsoft’s Azure announced a file service last year. Customers look for performance matching when they decide to shift their workloads to the cloud. In recent years, public cloud providers tried to address this by moving to Solid State Drives (SSDs). This type of storage is expensive, but customers still prefer to run their workload sets on them. Microsoft’s Azure Premium Storage claims to offer the best public cloud storage for this type of work. The Premium Storage is aimed for Azure VM workloads that require constant IO performance and low latency. It needs to be attached to Azure DS Series VMs in the form of a Page Blob or Data Disk. Multiple disks can be attached to a VM in order to get up to 32 TB of storage per VM. With the right configuration, VMs can reach what is considered the best performance on the public cloud: 50,000 IOPS.

 

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The new storage can be used by both Windows and Linux VMs. The fee structure is as follows: 128GB for $17.92, 512GB for $66.56 and 1TB for $122.88.

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Cloud Services, Cloud Storage, Cloud Technology

SoftNAS Helps Solve Enterprise Storage Problems

SoftNAS, a leading software company that provides storage software to protect critical data across all types of clouds, announced today that their new solution for on-site, hybrid and public cloud storage management, called the SoftNAS Cloud File Gateway, is available. It aims to manage the high expenses behind baking up data and time required to archive and retrieve older data. SoftNAS Cloud File Gateway allows on-site and hybrid cloud storage systems to exist as a unified, shared file system to maximize savings and flexibility. The software is ideal for enterprises due to its local caching and S3 object storage connectivity.

 

Research done by Markets and Research show that the cloud storage market should grow by about 54% in the next four years. The amount of data being collected and stored is also expected to double every 18 months. SoftNAS is trying to transform how IT is delivered, making data available wherever customers need it in a timely manner without adding too much cost and infrastructure. Their new software allows companies to do just that.

 

SoftNAS Cloud File Gateway overcomes the singular gateway problem facing many companies by combining three things. First is access to on-site and private storage. Second is access to public cloud storage. Lastly is a unified shared system with NAS features via NSF and CIFS/SMB. These allow customers that want a traditional file system as well as the ability to use S3 compatible storage to reasonably implement their wishes.

 

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Businesses struggle with backups that cause restrictions due to time, space and hardware. Any NFS or CIFS compatible backup tool can be used to store high-speed backups using the Cloud File Gateway onto local storage, S3 compatible object storage and iSCSI SANs. Along with the newly released SoftNAS Cloud version 3.3, backups can happen up to 10 times faster and archival use can be up to 5 times faster.

 

The SoftNAS software is the perfect compliment to VMware Virtual SAN with the requisite NAS features, unified storage and CIFS/SMB with Active Directory integration. It extends the VMware to include highly durable storage up to 26 petabytes of secure off-site storage. SoftNAS extends the virtual SAN storage, Offers a full NAS filer feature set and Access to patent pending Hybrid HA tunneling provides non-stop Cloud HA across datacenters with block replication, automatic failover and seamless HA storage between a premise-based VMware data center and vCloud Air.

 

They also provide a complete software-defined storage solution for private, hybrid and public clouds that is easy to download, install and run on existing VMware vSphere host with a feature set that includes encrypted and highly durable storage, SSD caching, accessible via standard protocols, no special hardware required, transforms VMware into a comprehensive storage solution and multi-user capable for service providers.

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Cloud computing, cloud security, Cloud Services

Army Increases Its Cloud Computing Usage

The US Army has begun to use IBM’s hybrid cloud technology to process their transactions, the amount of which surpasses the amount of transactions performed on the New York Stock Exchange. This occurred last year when the Army switched its Logistics Support Activity system to a hybrid cloud.

 

The hybrid cloud system is used by more than 65,000 personnel to obtain, manage and maintain inventories of products needed by the troops out on the field. Utilizing a cloud to perform these functions allow the Army to better utilize the data it collects, which in turn will provide better insight and service to members. IBM claims that since the switch, the Army has seen savings of up to 50%.

 

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With the success of the use of a hybrid cloud, the Army has now set eyes on introducing new analytical services, such as data mining, that can be rolled out to all parts of the organization. Anne Altman, general manager for US federal at IBM, has said that hybrid cloud implementation has enabled the Army to keep its existing investments in on-premise technology while also benefiting from a hybrid cloud, such as security, scalability and being able to connect to existing infrastructure.

 

The Army has always been a progressive adopter of promising information technologies, and other agencies and organizations are following in their footsteps. For example, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) signed a $600 million cloud contract with Amazon Web Services, which IBM lost out on. After this loss, IBM went on to gain momentum in the federal space and signed other cabinet agencies and pushing forward with a cloud data center targeting defense department workloads. This center is housed in the Navy-owned Allegany Ballistics Laboratory in West Virginia.

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Cloud Services, Cloud Technology, Collaboration

HP Cannot Compete As Public Cloud Service Provider

One year ago HP thought it would be competing with Amazon, Google and Microsoft to become the leader in cloud services. HP has re-branded and re-launched their cloud services many times, the most recent being their Helion service. However, the customer base is practically non-existent.

 

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Last year they acquired Eucalyptus, an open-source vendor that was marketed as being Amazon Web Service compatible. This deal made no sense, and just added to HP’s gloomy cloud history. Though they are ceding the public cloud, they are still selling servers. Their largest customers are cloud companies or cloud behemoths. For other companies, HP hopes to build smaller cloud systems in ways that they can also utilize Amazon, Microsoft and other services.

 

For example a company could use HP computers to create content and Microsoft to handle email or heavy workloads on information. Salesforce.com is cloud platform used to share information.

 

HP was the leader in selling computer services to business, so it looked like selling computing in a new way would be easy for them. However, due to the scale of public clouds, with more than a million servers on each one, being difficult to learn it is very hard for newcomers to enter the market.

 

Enabling companies to create their own software applications is an important aspect of corporate technology, and is an area where HP seriously lacks. HP has put their engineers and sales people together to become better acquainted with each others services in order to promote the sharing of assets and collaboration.

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Cloud Services, Cloud Technology, Computer Electronics

Sony To Purchase OnLive Cloud Gaming

OnLive is a cloud gaming company that was once estimated to be worth $1.8 billion but has been burdened by massive amounts of debt. Sony Computer Entertainment has begun to buy different assets of the company for $4.8 million, including U.S. and international patents for cloud gaming services. OnLive will officially close its doors at the end of this month.

 

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OnLive says that its gaming services will continue to be offered until the end of the month, but new subscriptions and renewals will not be processed, and anyone who was charged for these after March 28 with be refunded their money. This purchase comes at a time when Sony is recovering from its own gaming losses, and signifies a push to advance their own gaming technology.

 

The strategic purchase of OnLive gives Sony’s gamer’s great opportunities as well as giving Sony’s cloud portfolio a boost. OnLive was a leader in the field of online, cloud-based gaming, and had investors like Warner Bros, AT&T, and HTC. Despite all of this, other companies have jumped onboard to offer games that stick better than OnLive’s and have been successful. OnLive was started bac in 2007 as one of the most ambitious gaming startups Silicon Valley had ever seen, but they did not receive as large of a customer base as they had hoped and quickly lost steam.

 

Sony now holds a lot of cloud gamin intellectual property, and has used some of it to launch their own gaming platforms. In 2012, they bought the Gaikai streaming service for $380 million to help launch their PlayStation Now cloud game service.

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Cloud Services, Cloud Technology, Collaboration

IBM’s Internet of Things + Partnership With The Weather Channel

Last fall, IBM announced their Internet of Things (IoT) Foundation service on its BlueMix cloud-based platform. This news was overshadowed by the announcement this week that they plan to invest over $3 billion to build a dedicated IoT unit consisting of over 2,000 consultants, researchers and developers over the course of the next four years.

 

Along with this news, IBM announced that they are building a cloud-based platform to assist clients and partners to enhance real-time data and insights from various sources directly to business operations. In a separate announcement they said they would be partnering with The Weather Channel for an IoT service, as The Weather Channel is adding IBM as its cloud services provider.

 

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The IoT foundation already has offered developers a set of APIs to simplify data access from Internet-connected devices. The new service includes IoT Cloud Open Platform for Industries (new analytics services offered directed at developing and delivering vertical industry IoT apps for cloud customers), BlueMix IoT Zone (new IoT services to support integration of IoT data into cloud-based apps) and the IoT Ecosystem (expanding partnerships with existing chip, device and industry partners to confirm the secure and easy integration of data solutions and services to their cloud platform).

 

The Weather Company, parent company of The Weather Channel, runs its weather-data-services-platform on Amazon only. They capture more than 20TB of data per day in order to drive their predictions accurately. The use of IBM’s cloud platform shows how the cloud market is heating up. The CIO/CTO of The Weather Company says they believe in multi-cloud stories, so cloud-based businesses or applications need to be built in an agnostic manner. This is the reason why they have been on a three-year journey to integrate IBM’s SoftLayer to power opportunities beyond what AWS could do alone.

 

The data from the Weather Channel’s WSI (B2B) will be made available to IBM IoT ecosystem customers so that they can make decisions about supply chains and customer buying patterns with accurate up to minute forecasts. IBM creating a dedicated business unit means that they can bring more focus and scale IoT opportunities. IBM feels that it is the right time for IoT to become the mainstream source of innovation across various industries.

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Big Data, BigData, Business Processes

New Updates For HP’s Big Data Platform Haven

HP has updated its big data platform Haven to include new analytics and predictive capabilities. This platform is geared towards enterprises with lots of data of various types, and the new update expands the type of data that can be analyzed through a new connector framework. A new Knowledge Graphing feature will be implemented along with better speech recognition and language identification features.

 

The Haven big data platform is made up of analytics, hardware and services with some of this available on-demand. HP’s big data platform was begun in 2013 with Haven being the umbrella for various technologies. The update brings together analytics for structured and unstructured data by combining context-aware unstructured data service analytics of HP IDOL with SQL-based capabilities of HP Vertica.

 

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Examples of this type of service include Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Oracle, and SAP enterprise applications and cloud services such as Box, Salesforce and Google Drive.

 

The knowledge-graphing feature mentioned above could analyze connections in data, enabling advanced and contextually aware research within assorted data sources. The enhanced speech and language capabilities of the update are able to work with 20 languages. This part of Haven is powered by advanced deep neural technology and stems from thousands of hours of audio sampling via this neural network.

 

Other enhancements include targeted query response and IDOL search optimizer. The targeted query response helps customize and improve search results based on specific criteria. The IDOL search optimizer is used for understanding the types of searches being done by users and then gauging the quality of results.

 

The goal of HP’s Haven platform is to not have big companies relying on specialized data scientists or costly, complex integration projects in order to benefit from big data computing across almost any data type.

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Cloud Technology, Collaboration

Microsoft and Ford’s New Cloud Based Partnership

Microsoft and Ford have worked together in the past to bring us Sync: a revolutionary technology that shifted a long standing reliance on hardware-based in-dash content and brought in an era of being able to access a portable device for entertainment. The original Sync system was way before the age of the cloud, and it was basically used to access music on iPod devices and take calls through Bluetooth.

 

Sync was the first software-based system, meaning it could be upgraded and features could be added later on. Other companies tried to follow suit, and the second generation Sync MyFord Touch system fell short of expectations. For the newest version of Sync, Sync 3, Ford teamed up with QNX. Many saw this as Ford ditching Microsoft, but they recently announced that they are working together on the Ford Service Delivery Network powered my Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform.

 

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This network is not going to rely just on Wi-Fi, and will include a built-in modem that can connect with the cloud and smartphone applications. This leverages the existing MyFord and MyLincoln smartphone apps.

 

Though Ford was the first to introduce this innovative technology with the original Sync, a lack of embedded connections in its cars has meant that Ford is already being left in the dust by automakers like Tesla who take advantage of over-the-air update capability. The new embedded modems will allow the new system to do exactly this.

 

The new capabilities of this Delivery Network will be in select vehicles by the end of the year, and will begin to be implemented in most vehicles by the end of next year. There is not yet a pricing structure, but the price of it is not subscription based and will be included in the price of the vehicle. However, additional features and new services that will be added in the future will most likely be a pay as you use or pay as you go sort of model.

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Amazon AWS, Cloud Storage

Amazon Cloud’s Unlimited Storage Plans

Amazon recently announced two unlimited storage plans for its cloud-based storage service Amazon Cloud Drive. The plan focuses on two points. The first is for those who want to store an unlimited amount of photos, called the Unlimited Photos Plan, which costs $11.99 per year. The second is called the Unlimited Everything Plan that costs $59.99 per year. There is also a free three-month trial, but at around $5 per month it is a great deal no matter how much or how little storage you actually will use.

 

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Previously, Amazon offered 5 GB of cloud storage for free and a tiered price structure for anything more. The most storage offered was 1TB for $500 per year. The new plan completely crushes these plans. Amazon has not said whether it will allow those on the 5GB free plan to stay that way or upgrade them to the lowest tier of the new plans, though the old plans are most likely going to be obsolete in the near future.

 

The Amazon Cloud Drive, unlike some other drive services, does not have proper desktop sync software. This means you have to manually select the files and folders you want to upload and then manually download them when you add them to another device through the cloud. It does, however, have an automatic photo backup apps for iOS and Android.

 

In comparison of the Amazon Cloud Drive:

  • Dropbox charges $10 for 1TB per month with 2GB available for free
  • Google charges $9.99 per month for 1TB and $299 for 30TB with 15GB free
  • Apple charges $19.99 per month for 1TB with 5GB free
  • Microsoft charges $6.99 per month for 1TB ad 15GB free

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Cloud computing, Cloud Hosting, Cloud Server, Cloud Services

Hewlett-Packard Announces New Cloud Service: Helion Rack

HP announced recently a new preconfigured package of software and hardware targeted towards enterprises who want to adopt the cloud but also keep their computational resources in-house: the Helion Rack. It is designed to aid companies adopt a private cloud much faster.

The use of a private cloud allows organizations to use cloud services on an internal network. However, creating a private cloud network can be quite difficult, taking organizations months to do. With Helion Rack, HP creates each system in its facilities then sets it up at the customer’s location. There has been much done to secure the system and tune it for maximum performance.

Helion Rack is based on open source software; specifically HP used OpenStack for infrastructure services. HP is a large contributor to the OpenStack project, and therefore has expertise on hand to help with any issues. OpenStack is also used for HP’s Helion Public Cloud service.

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On the platform services side, HP used Cloud Foundry software, also open source. HP has also installed their Helion Development Platform, which is simply a set of development tools. For the hardware, HP went with ProLiant DL servers, which includes storage and network components.

Helion Rack is a great platform for developing new applications, specifically those that will run on a cloud infrastructure. It is also designed to deal with heavy workloads like data analysis and hosting. Helion Rack will be available starting in April and pricing is based on configuration starting with a system that can support 400 virtual machines.

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