Category Archives: Amazon Web Services

Amazon AWS, Amazon S3, Amazon Web Services, CloudBerry, CloudBerry Explorer, CloudBerry Lab, Storage

CloudBerry Explorer Adds Support for Cloudian

CloudBerry Lab today released CloudBerry Explorer, an application that allows users to manage files in Amazon S3 storage buckets just as they would on their local computers. This new version offers support for Gemini Technologies’ industry-leading Cloudian Cloud storage solution.

Cloudian is an S3 API compliant, multi-tenant, multi-datacenter cloud storage platform that enables cloud service providers and enterprises to cost-effectively deploy extremely scalable and reliable object storage services within public and private clouds. The Cloudian platform leverages commodity servers and offers a fully distributed, peer-to-peer architecture, with no single point of failure. The solution easily scales from one node up to hundreds of nodes across multiple data centers, supporting petabytes of data. Cloudian also provides a comprehensive user interface for both end user applications as well as administrative functions, including billing, monitoring and provisioning.

CloudBerry Explorer allows end users to accomplish simple tasks without special technical knowledge, automate time-consuming tasks to improve productivity. The new version of CloudBerry Explorer helps users manage Cloudian storage just as they manage Amazon S3. Users can upload files to Cloudian, create buckets and folders and perform other management tasks simply and efficiently.

“Our Cloudian solution is all about accessibility, scalability and affordability, while offering unmatched performance and security,” said Giorgio Propersi, General Manager, Gemini Technologies. “CloudBerry Explorer is a great tool which reflects the same principles and goals as Cloudian. We are pleased to see it help even more customers adopt our leading cloud storage platform.”

CloudBerry Explorer is designed to work on Windows 2003/XP/Vista/2008 and Windows 7. Microsoft PowerShell command line interface allows advanced computer users integrate Amazon S3 storage access with other routines.

“Cloudian is one of the most powerful and accessible storage solutions on the market today,” said Aleksey Serkov, CTO, CloudBerry Lab. “We are pleased to meet growing customer demand by helping companies of all sizes adopt and manage Cloudian regardless of their technical expertise level.”

CloudBerry Explorer for Windows is a freeware. CloudBerry Explorer PRO costs $39.99 (US).


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.


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.”


Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, AWS, New York Times, Outage Alert

Eastern US Storms Also Disrupted the Technology Cloud

The New York Times has an interesting article on new concerns over Cloud Computing (that is to say, AWS) reliability in the wake of recent outages caused by the weather.

The interruption underlined how businesses and consumers are increasingly exposed to unforeseen risks and wrenching disruptions as they increasingly embrace life in the cloud. It was also a big blow to what is probably the fastest-growing part of the media business, start-ups on the social Web that attract millions of users seemingly overnight.

As someone who was involved during the pre-cloud era in private data centers and later colocation facilities for startups, small and medium-sized companies, I have a question:

Does anyone really think they can do any better on their own?

Read the article.


Amazon AWS, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, Amazon Web Services, Asia/Pacific Rim, Australia, CloudFront, Hosting, Sydney

Amazon AWS Adds First Austrailian Edge Location for CloudFront, Route 53

Amazon AWS has announced the launch of their newest edge location in Sydney, Australia to serve end users of Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53.

According the AWS, “This is our first edge location in Australia and with this location Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53 now have a total of 33 edge locations worldwide. Each new edge location helps lower latency and improves performance for your end users. We have launched 8 new edge locations in 2012 and we plan to continue to add new edge locations worldwide.”

“An edge location in Australia has been frequently requested by our customers so we are excited to add this location to our global network. If you’re already using Amazon CloudFront or Amazon Route 53, you don’t need to do anything to your applications as requests are automatically routed to this location when appropriate.”


Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, AWS, MySAP All-in-One, Partnerships, SAP, Windows Server 2008 R2

AWS, SAP Announce Cost-saving AWS Infrastructure for SAP Business All-in-One Solutions

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Amazon Web Services today announced the expansion of SAP certified solutions on AWS including SAP Business All-in-One solutions for both Linux and Windows, and expanded certification for SAP Rapid Deployment solutions and SAP Business Objects business intelligence (BI) solutions to include Windows Server 2008 R2. Today’s announcements provide customers the flexibility to rapidly deploy SAP solutions on the scalable, on-demand AWS platform without making long-term commitments or costly capital expenditures for their underlying infrastructure. As more enterprises seek to understand cost savings of cloud deployments, Germany based consulting firm, VMS AG has also announced industry research that finds running SAP applications on AWS provides infrastructure cost savings of up to 69% compared to the same solution on-premises. For more information on deploying SAP solutions on AWS as well as detailed research on infrastructure cost savings of running SAP solutions on AWS, visit http://aws.amazon.com/sap

“LIONSGATE is a $2 billion diversified global entertainment corporation that produces feature films and television programming to a worldwide audience,” said Theresa Miller, Vice President, Information Technology, LIONSGATE. “Faced with IT challenges including expanding infrastructure and costs, and increased enterprise application workloads, LIONSGATE began using AWS in 2010 to avoid acquiring additional data center space, saving an estimated $1M+ over three years. Now utilizing SAP solutions in a Windows environment, LIONSGATE has migrated their SAP development, test and QA systems to run on the AWS cloud.”

Emergency Medicine Business Intelligence (EMBI) provides HIPAA compliant analytic tools for hospital emergency departments to monitor productivity, utilization and patient care. “Cloud computing allows hospitals the ability to buy mission critical software and hardware as a service instead of trying to manage demand internally,” said Scott Richards, CEO at EMBI. “Deploying SAP Business Objects BI solutions on AWS, with solution provider DecisionFirst, allows us to leverage industry-leading business intelligence toolsets to provide our customers web-based, on-demand, key performance metrics they need to manage their operations and business. With these solutions our emergency department clients are able to focus on providing a higher level of service to their customers.”

Merrifield Garden Center, one of the largest and most complete garden nurseries in the US, is using SAP Business All-in-One on AWS to manage inventory, purchasing and accounts. “Our IT operations were simply not keeping pace with the rapid growth of our business,” said Bryan Moore IT Director at Merrifield Garden Center. “Running our SAP Business All-in-One solution on AWS, with systems integrator Savantis and managed services provider Protera, provided dependable infrastructure and offered an affordable solution that enhanced security and the flexibility needed to scale up and scale down during seasonal demand swings.”

Leveraging its industry-leading intelligence VMS AG has developed detailed cost analysis of running SAP solutions on AWS using the best practices of more than 2,600 SAP environments. The research found infrastructure savings of up to 69%, on AWS, compared to an SAP Business All-in-One system running on-premises.

“Customers have experienced tremendous success when running their SAP applications on AWS,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, senior vice president, Ecosystem and Channels, SAP. “Today’s announcement offers enterprises and midsized companies alike the flexibility to deploy SAP applications and analytics solutions quickly and scale up as the business grows.”

“We have seen a rapid increase in businesses deploying SAP solutions on AWS,” said Terry Wise, Director of AWS Worldwide Partner Ecosystem. “Whether it’s running SAP applications for development and testing or production applications, businesses can take advantage of the AWS pay-as-you-go model and quickly scale capacity both up and down as needed, paying only for the resources used.”

To learn more about cost savings of running SAP solutions on AWS, visit http://bit.ly/IVsXYI


Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, AWS, AWS Marketplace, CA ARCserve, CA Technologies

CA ARCserve Now Available on Amazon Web Services Marketplace

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CA Technologies today announced that CA ARCserve Backup and CA ARCserve D2D are now available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace.

AWS Marketplace is an online store that makes it easy for customers to find, buy, and immediately start using the software and services that they need to build products and run their businesses. CA Technologies software products sold on AWS Marketplace are fulfilled on and billed by Amazon Web Services (AWS), simplifying customer deployment of CA ARCserve Backup and CA ARCserve D2D.

“AWS Marketplace offers IT buyers a great way to quickly zero in on the products they need to meet their business technology challenges,” said Steve Fairbanks, vice president of product management at CA Technologies. “By making CA ARCserve available on AWS Marketplace, CA Technologies is making it as easy as possible for customers to access a complete solution for protecting data across both conventional and cloud-based environments.”

Customers can purchase multiple data protection functionalities of CA ARCserve Backup and CA ARCserve D2D with a single license based on the total amount of data they need to protect. They also can acquire the products through traditional licensing models.

“It’s a pleasure to work with CA Technologies and we are excited for their participation in AWS Marketplace,” said Terry Hanold, VP of New Business Initiatives at AWS. “Combining CA Technologies data protection products with AWS’s highly scalable, secure and flexible platform provides our joint customers an easy way to use CA ARCserve software on the AWS platform.”


Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, AWS, AWS Marketplace, CA ARCserve, CA Technologies

CA ARCserve Now Available on Amazon Web Services Marketplace

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CA Technologies today announced that CA ARCserve Backup and CA ARCserve D2D are now available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace.

AWS Marketplace is an online store that makes it easy for customers to find, buy, and immediately start using the software and services that they need to build products and run their businesses. CA Technologies software products sold on AWS Marketplace are fulfilled on and billed by Amazon Web Services (AWS), simplifying customer deployment of CA ARCserve Backup and CA ARCserve D2D.

“AWS Marketplace offers IT buyers a great way to quickly zero in on the products they need to meet their business technology challenges,” said Steve Fairbanks, vice president of product management at CA Technologies. “By making CA ARCserve available on AWS Marketplace, CA Technologies is making it as easy as possible for customers to access a complete solution for protecting data across both conventional and cloud-based environments.”

Customers can purchase multiple data protection functionalities of CA ARCserve Backup and CA ARCserve D2D with a single license based on the total amount of data they need to protect. They also can acquire the products through traditional licensing models.

“It’s a pleasure to work with CA Technologies and we are excited for their participation in AWS Marketplace,” said Terry Hanold, VP of New Business Initiatives at AWS. “Combining CA Technologies data protection products with AWS’s highly scalable, secure and flexible platform provides our joint customers an easy way to use CA ARCserve software on the AWS platform.”


Amazon Web Services, AWS, AWS Marketplace, IT Management, Private Cloud, Saas, Software as a service

New AWS Marketplace Offers Pre-Configured Software for the AWS Cloud

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Amazon Web Services today launched AWS Marketplace, an online store that makes it easy for customers to find, compare, and immediately start using the software and technical services they need to build products and run their businesses. Visitors to AWS Marketplace can use 1-Click deployment to quickly launch pre-configured software and pay only for what they use, by the hour or month, while benefiting from the scalable, flexible and on-demand features of AWS. With AWS Marketplace, software and Software as a Service (SaaS) providers with offerings that run on the AWS Cloud can benefit from increased customer awareness, simplified deployment, and automated billing. AWS Marketplace features a wide selection of commercial and free IT and business software, including software infrastructure such as databases and application servers, developer tools, and business applications – available from popular vendors such as 10gen, CA, Canonical, Couchbase, Check Point Software, IBM, Microsoft, SAP AG, and Zend, as well as many widely used open source offerings including Drupal, MediaWiki, and WordPress. To get started with AWS Marketplace please visit: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace.

AWS Marketplace simplifies many of the traditional challenges software and SaaS companies face, such as acquiring customers, developing distribution channels, and billing for their software. With AWS Marketplace, a simple listing process makes it quick and easy to add products and expose them to AWS’s hundreds of thousands of active customers. Product prices are clearly stated and charges appear on the same bill as a customer’s other AWS services. Customers can quickly deploy products found in the marketplace and software providers can easily add billing to their products by specifying hourly or monthly charges, without undertaking costly code changes. Billing is managed by AWS Marketplace, relieving sellers of the responsibility of managing customer accounts and processing payments, and leaving software developers more time to focus on building great software.

“AWS Marketplace brings the same simple, trusted, and secure online shopping experience that customers enjoy on Amazon.com’s retail website to software built for the AWS platform, streamlining the process of doing research and purchasing software,” said Terry Hanold, Vice President of New Business Initiatives, AWS. “AWS Marketplace makes it even easier to run software on AWS because you can find a wide variety of AWS ecosystem providers’ solutions, in one place, where much of the work involved in building and deploying solutions on top of AWS has already been done for you by these solutions providers.”

AWS is the leading cloud platform with a fast growing ecosystem of providers building solutions on top of the platform.

“Zend Application Fabric enables developers to confidently deploy fast, elastic and dependable PHP applications,” said Zend CEO Andi Gutmans. “AWS Marketplace makes it simple for our customers to access Zend on the AWS cloud and pay only for the infrastructure needed to run their applications. By providing customers a single invoice for combined software and server capacity, businesses can operate more effectively than ever before.”

“AWS Marketplace provides companies like ours an opportunity to easily reach new customers,” said Carolee Gearhart, SAP’s National Vice President of OEM & Strategic Partner Group for North America. “We expect our customers will benefit from SAP’s robust BI functionality, while taking advantage of the quick deployment capabilities provided by AWS Marketplace.”

Customers can browse AWS Marketplace or learn more details about its features and benefits of AWS Marketplace by visiting https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace.