All posts by Richard

Android, Google, Google Chrome OS, Google Compute Engine, Google Drive, High Performance Computing, Internet Technology, Kansas City Missouri, Mobile, Motorola, Networking, Telecommunications Industry, Television, Video

Google Fiber Has Far-reaching Implications

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Reading this post on Google’s low-cost, super-fast fiber-to-the-home initiative (makes me sort of wish I lived in Kansas City) brought to mind all the other Google products and initiatives that might be empowered by it. Go read it, then come back here and consider:

Chrome OS: it takes a long time to make a new operating system and it looks trivial today, but with widely available gigabit internet at the household and small business level it begins to look like a realistic “the network is the computer” future.

Mobile OS: Google already has that covered with Android.

Add Google Drive: Ubiquitous very high speed connectivity at a low price makes Drive viable for more than backup, sharing and synch. Actually synch becomes easier if the only copy is on a server.

Add Google Compute Engine: A thin-client netbook running Chrome OS, or Android on tablets and handsets, become more appealing if you  can quickly access network-based computing resources for high-performance computing tasks like video transcoding.

Add Google Voice: consider all those hypothetical hotspots. Combine with Android and Voice. Can a Google competitor to cell phone providers be far behind, one that leverages the coming Google network? All it would take is a couple extra capabilities in the fiber/WiFi box that seems inevitable. And don’t forget they now own Motorola, a top-notch mobile phone company.

YouTube/Google TV: Already dipping its toe into original programming, and fast fiber means TV will change dramatically.

Living In the cloud would become a real option for everyday consumers. What about effects on professionals and small businesses?

And what about those other seemingly sci-fi projects, self driving cars and Glass? Hey, if the car drives itself my brain then has the bandwidth for augmented reality. How might they benefit from the ability to hop from fiber-connected WiFi hotspot to hotspot?

All this based on a good search engine algorithm, and then ads next to search results? Who’d a thunk it?


Avnet, M&A Activity, Pepperweed Consulting

Avnet Acquires Pepperweed Consulting

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Avnet, Inc.  announced today that it has acquired Pepperweed Consulting, an IT enterprise management and integration provider. As an HP Software Elite Partner and winner of multiple HP Partner-of-the-Year awards, Pepperweed Consulting works with channel partners and customers to buy, deploy, support and manage HP IT Performance Suite, Converged Cloud and Insight software stacks. With more than 3000 successful engagements at Fortune 500 clients and large-scale government agencies, the company helps customers architect, implement and operate the right solution to meet their data center and cloud initiative goals on time and on budget. The company generated revenue of approximately US$12 million in the 2011 calendar year.

“The acquisition of Pepperweed supports our strategic focus of expanding our services and software portfolio to help drive growth for both our supplier and reseller partners,” stated Jeff Bawol, president, Avnet Technology Solutions, Americas. “The addition of Pepperweed Consulting will complement our industry leading vertical market practices by providing software and services to help our HP reseller partners deliver increasingly complex and customized IT solutions needed by customers in high growth markets such as government, healthcare, energy, financial and retail.”

Founded in 1996, Pepperweed Consulting provides multi-vendor technology expertise, services and support, complemented by internally developed components to meet each project’s specific goals. This acquisition will be integrated into the operations of Avnet Technology Solutions in the Americas.


Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Service, AWS, KnowYourCloud Analytics, Newvem, Reserved Instances, Tools

Newvem Launches New Tool to Help Amazon Web Services Customers Make Sense of Reserved Instances

 

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Newvem has launched a new tool as part of its KnowYourCloud Analytics web application. Newvem’s new Reserved Instances Decision Tool helps Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers make the right decision on exactly which On-Demand Instances should be moved to Reserved Instances. With KnowYourCloud Analytics, AWS users have insight into their cloud usage patterns and can now easily determine – based on flexibility, availability and cost considerations – whether a long-term commitment to Reserved Instances is the right decision for their business.

To keep ahead of competitors and give customers more value, Amazon is promoting Reserved Instances, which, compared to On-Demand Instances – the popular pay-as-you-go model that AWS is known for, offer even more cost savings and assured capacity availability. Reserved Instances require long-term commitments to Amazon with contracts ranging from one to three years. The problem is that moving to Reserved Instances is an extremely complex decision for IT and finance managers, who must weigh the tradeoffs between costs and utilization over time and between flexibility and a long-term commitment.

“Newvem’s KnowYourCloud Analytics is like Google Analytics for cloud computing,” said Zev Laderman, Newvem’s co-founder and CEO. “It scans AWS usage patterns and lets AWS users know if they can benefit from Reserved Instances, indicates which parts of their cloud would benefit the most, and offers recommendations on how to execute the move.”


DropBox, spam, Storage

Dropbox Employee Account Hack Led to Customers being Spammed

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Dropbox this week fessed  up to having been hacked, most notably an employee account that contained project data including a list of customer emails (at least it shows they use their own product). That resulted in a rash of spam that eventually led to the discovery of the compromised passwords.

A couple weeks ago, we started getting emails from some users about spam they were receiving at email addresses used only for Dropbox. We’ve been working hard to get to the bottom of this, and want to give you an update.

Our investigation found that usernames and passwords recently stolen from other websites were used to sign in to a small number of Dropbox accounts. We’ve contacted these users and have helped them protect their accounts.

A stolen password was also used to access an employee Dropbox account containing a project document with user email addresses. We believe this improper access is what led to the spam. We’re sorry about this, and have put additional controls in place to help make sure it doesn’t happen again.

They claim it was usernames and password stolen from other sites that led to the trickledown effects on Dropbox accounts. Another reason to use a different password for every site you sign up for.

Their post on the topic includes news of a new page that lets you examine all active logins to your account.


Content Management, Education, Electronic commerce, Hosting, Internet marketing, Panopta, Torbit, Web Design and Development, Web Performance Optimization

Speed Awareness Month Highlights Why Split Seconds Count on the Web

A consortium of web-performance industry companies today launched SpeedAwareness Month, a web-based educational program designed to help site owners learn about the importance of improving their website download speeds.

Speed Awareness month will run through the month of August 2012.

Research shows that many consumers will abandon a site if it takes longer than two seconds to load.  Similarly, slow website speeds can impact search engine rankings, can increase pay-per-click advertising costs, reduce sales conversions and, in the end, decrease revenues.

Maximizing the performance of a website is as essential to site operators as having the right content and marketing program. On the Speed Awareness Month website, site owners can find regular blog posts, best practice recommendations, tutorials and free or trial services and tools they can use to boost website speed.

Speed Awareness Month is a collaborative effort organized by the following industry leading firms: Dyn Inc., MaxCDN,Panopta, Torbit, UberTags, StackExchange.com catchpoint.com and lognormal.com. More companies are expected to join the effort through the month.

Best practice and thought leadership content will come from the sponsors and more than 20 other industry thought leaders.

“I am very excited to see how many companies and experts are participating in Speed Awareness Month. We hope to reach as many website owners as possible and make them aware of the importance of website performance for their business,” said David Henzel, Speed Awareness Month organizer and vice president of marketing for NetDNA/MaxCDN. “The tips and free tools offered during this month will be a huge help for web masters to find out where the bottlenecks of their sites are and how to remove them.”

Speed Awareness Month is designed for all developers, system administrators, eCommerce shop owners and everyone that has a passion for website development and improvement.

The event is open to content from any experts who want to participate and have a passion or spread knowledge about web performance optimization.  To contribute, contact David Henzel at dhenzel@netdna.com.


Amazon, Amazon AWS, Amazon EBS, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Web Services, AWS, High Performance Computing, IOPS, Storage

Amazon Web Services Launches High Performance Storage Option for Amazon Elastic Block Store

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Amazon Web Services today announced new features for customers looking to run high performance databases in the cloud with the launch of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Provisioned IOPS. Provisioned IOPS (input/output operations per second) are a new EBS volume type designed to deliver predictable, high performance for I/O intensive workloads, such as database applications, that rely on consistent and fast response times. With Provisioned IOPS, customers can flexibly specify both volume size and volume performance, and Amazon EBS will consistently deliver the desired performance over the lifetime of the volume. To get started with Amazon EBS, visit http://aws.amazon.com/ebs.

Provisioned IOPS volumes are engineered to allow customers to develop, test, and deploy production applications and be confident that they will receive their desired performance. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can create an EBS volume provisioned with the storage and IOPS they need and attach it to their Amazon EC2 instance. Amazon EBS currently supports up to 1,000 IOPS per Provisioned IOPS volume, with plans to deliver higher limits soon. Customers can attach multiple Amazon EBS volumes to an Amazon EC2 instance and stripe across them to deliver thousands of IOPS to their application.

To enable Amazon EC2 instances to fully utilize the IOPS provisioned on an EBS volume, Amazon EC2 is introducing the ability to launch selected Amazon EC2 instance types as EBS-Optimized instances. EBS-Optimized instances deliver dedicated throughput between Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS, with options between 500 Megabits per second and 1,000 Megabits per second depending on the instance type used. The combination of EBS Provisioned IOPS and EBS-Optimized instances allows customers to run their most performance-sensitive applications on Amazon EC2, giving them predictable scaling with the same ease of use, durability, and flexibility of provisioning benefits they expect from Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS.

“AWS introduced Amazon EBS in 2008 to provide a highly scalable virtual storage service and now, four years later, our customers are running applications on Amazon EC2 using EBS volumes at tremendous scale,” said Peter De Santis, Vice President of Amazon EC2. “Customers have been asking for the ability to set their performance rate to achieve consistently high performance. With EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes, EBS-Optimized instances and the recently launched High I/O SSD-based EC2 instances, customers have a range of choices for running their most demanding applications and databases on AWS while achieving peak performance in a predictable manner.”

At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Amazon EBS is used to support various missions and research programs. Consistent performance of I/O is a major requirement for numerous use cases across NASA ranging from scientific computing to large scale database deployments. JPL now routinely provisions cloud compute capacity in an elastic manner but database latencies have proven difficult. To help meet this challenge, JPL’s missions and its Office of the CIO prototyped the new EBS Provisioned IOPS capability to provision flexible compute capacity and overcome database latency restrictions. The results were highly successful and the release of EBS Provisioned IOPS, coupled with Amazon EC2 High I/O SSD-based instances, will introduce a whole new realm of I/O intensive scientific applications for JPL from radar data processing to the quest of black holes.

Stratalux is a leader in building and managing tailored cloud solutions for customers of all sizes. “A common request we see from both our large and small customers is the need to support high performance database applications. Throughput consistency is critical for these workloads,” said Jeremy Przygode, CEO at Stratalux. “Based on positive results in our early testing, the combination of EBS Provisioned IOPS and EBS-Optimized instances will enable our customers to consistently scale their database applications to thousands of IOPS, enabling us to increase the number of I/O intensive workloads we support.”

Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes are currently available in the US-East (N. Virginia), US-West (N. California), US-West (Oregon), EU-West (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Japan) regions with additional Region launches coming soon.


AppFog, OpenStack, Partnerships, Rackspace, Standards

AppFog Collaborates with Rackspace to Support Open Cloud Ecosystem

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AppFog today announced it is collaborating with Rackspace to allow its customers to deploy applications to the open Rackspace Cloud powered by OpenStack. AppFog’s solution will be available through the recently announced Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace.

AppFog will offer customers the ability to develop and deploy apps to the open Rackspace Cloud in an efficient and cost effective manner. Highlighting a pay-for RAM approach, developers are able to receive 2GB free of RAM simply by creating an account. Users will reap the benefits of interoperability, as AppFog provides customers with the capacity to redeploy applications to Rackspace that are currently running on a different Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider with zero-code migrations, while helping users avoid vendor lock-in. AppFog’s IaaS deployment options continue to expand with the addition of Rackspace to a list that already includes AWS, HP, and Microsoft Azure. As a multi-language PaaS, AppFog supports Java, .NET, Node, Python, Ruby, PHP, MySQL, MongoDB, Postgres and more.

“We are very excited to align our efforts with Rackspace,” said Lucas Carlson, chief executive officer of AppFog. “As a market leader and a powerful force within OpenStack, Rackspace is a valuable option for developers looking for a reliable, scalable and secure IaaS option. With Cloud Databases and Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack, we can be assured that our efforts support open standards, protect against vendor lock-in and enable developers to deploy on public or private OpenStack-based clouds.”

The Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace is a comprehensive catalog of innovative, third-party-developed applications designed for the Rackspace Cloud. By leveraging OpenStack and developing solutions specifically for the open Rackspace Cloud, AppFog provides increased flexibility for customers and helps them avoid vendor lock-in. Additionally, through the marketplace, customers can now browse, review and connect to cloud solutions focused on management, monitoring, application deployment, security and a host of other areas.

“We’re excited to be working with AppFog and for their platform to be available through the Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace,” said Ven Shanmugam, senior manager of corporate strategy at Rackspace. “AppFog provides developers with a trusted platform for application development and deployment and we look forward to ongoing collaboration to have these capabilities available to our customers.”

For more information on AppFog, please visit www.appfog.com.


Amazon AWS, Amazon.com, Box, Cloud Storage, DropBox, Storage, Venture Funding

Box, Dropbox Coming of Age? Ready to Take on Amazon?

“Two of the buzziest competitors in cloud computing are settling into coexistence — and maybe figuring out ways to take on the giant in the market, Amazon.com.”

That’s the lead of a New York Times Bits column today that arrives on the heels of the news that Box has a new round of VC funding to the tune of$125 Million.

“Like its competitor Dropbox, Box offers a little bit of data storage free, then charges for additional amounts. Both companies make money from a relatively small number of paying customers who need large amounts of storage. Mr. Levie said Box has about 125,000 businesses using its service, but only “tens of thousands” of paying customers.

Despite being in the same business, the two companies seem to be finding entirely different customer bases. While Dropbox has a corporate service, it recently announced capacity and pricing changes in its much larger consumer business, aimed at encouraging people to store things like photos taken with cell phones.”

 


Application programming interface, Collaboration, eMix, Health Care, Health informatics, Medical, Medical imaging, Open Image Exchange, Partnerships

eMix integrates PACSGEAR API to Enable Medical Image Sharing

PACSGEAR today announced an agreement with eMix, a cloud-based virtualized electronic medical information exchange, to participate in the Open Image Exchange, a cloud-based network designed to securely share medical images and information. PACSGEAR will incorporate the application programming interface (API) from eMix to upload images and reports for cloud-based sharing and storage.

“We are pleased to have eMix join the network,” said Eli Rapaich, PACSGEAR’s CEO. “The success of the Open Image Exchange continues to be based on incorporating open APIs, which improves access to medical images and other health information,” Rapaich said.

“Being part of the Open Image Exchange improves access between healthcare institutions, physicians, and patients,” said Florent Saint-Clair, eMix general manager. “Our anytime, anywhere approach to securely sending patient information with eMix has now been adopted by over 450 customers. Open Image Exchange broadens our ability to connect with even great numbers of customers.”


Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, Chaos Monkey, Free, Netflix, Open Source, Tools

Netflix Chaos Monkeys: “If You Love Something Set It Free”

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Netflix has released its Chaos Monkey AWS “test-by-failure” tool as open source for all to use. The tool seeks to improve the resilience if the Netflix AWS cloud by forcing failure.

“We have found that the best defense against major unexpected failures is to fail often. By frequently causing failures, we force our services to be built in a way that is more resilient. We are excited to make a long-awaited announcement today that will help others who embrace this approach.

We have written about our Simian Army in the past and we are now proud to announce that the source code for the founding member of the Simian Army, Chaos Monkey, is available to the community. Do you think your applications can handle a troop of mischievous monkeys loose in your infrastructure? Now you can find out.”