In 2012 AWS released their Storage Gateway that you can access and try for free here using either an EC2 Amazon Machine Instance (AMI), or deployed locally on a hypervisor such as VMware vSphere/ESXi. About a year ago I did a storage gateway post (First, second and third impressions) when it was first released. I will do a new post soon following up with my subsequent impressions and experiences of having used it recently. For now, my quick (fourth impressions can be found here in this AWS Marketplace review). In general, the gateway is an AWS alternative to using third product gateway, appliances of software tools for accessing AWS storage.
AWS Going into a New Line of Work
TechCrunch noticed a want ad indicating that Amazon Web Services aims to apply its model to mobile to get deeper into enterprise by creating “what looks to be a whole new arm of its cloud division.”
The ad plainly says that “The Amazon Web Services (AWS) team is launching a new business,” and is looking for someone who wants to build “amazing customer experiences on tablet and mobile apps on Android or iOS platforms.”
The lucky candidate would be “responsible for creating and owning world-class production tablet and web client applications across major platforms including iOS and Android … As a member of the founding team, you will have significant influence on our overall strategy by helping define the product features, drive system architecture, and spearhead the best practices that enable a quality v1 product setting the ground work for a successful v2 and beyond.”
Here Comes Oracle’s New Sparc Servers
Larry Ellison’s latest scheme for proving his multibillion-dollar investment in Sun was a brilliant scheme will be to move features from the Oracle database like accelerated queries and Java middleware into Sun silicon.
“Software in silicon is redefining enterprise computing,” he said.
Larry dropped this little nugget Tuesday when he rolled out the latest generation of Solaris-based Sparc machines claiming they housed the world’s fastest processor.
The servers, set to compete against IBM and HP, mostly IBM, are supposed to be designed for the cloud and include an entry-to-mid-range T5 and a high-end M5. They’re said to offer “near linear scalability” from one to 32 sockets.
Both chips, each 28nm and based on the S3 core design, but different in their core count and L3 cache, clock in at 3.6GHz.
Federating Application Network Services
We (as in the industry) talk a lot about federating cloud. Usually solutions for federating cloud (aka hybrid cloud) are presented from the perspective of the end-user. We want to make it easier to transition between applications in the cloud and focus on identity management, single-sign on, and transparent integration that seamlessly directs users to the best resource, regardless of its deployment location.
But what about federation of the actual infrastructure? The architectures that support such ease of use features and functions for end-users should also be transparent and seamless and integrated. The disparity at the management layer between private cloud and traditional data center and public cloud is definitely a source of frustration for operations. Devops are code-switching between Amazon APIs, VMware vCloud solutions, and their own cloud management scripts and toolsets. Such disconnected processes result in inconsistent policies and a lack of holistic visibility into the performance and availability of applications that span environments. Ultimately, it negates the gains in deployment agility by introducing new overhead in management.
CloudStack Now a Top-Level Apache Program
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has made CloudStack, which it took in as an incubator project a year ago, a Top-Level Program (TLP).
That’s supposed to mean that Citrix, which donated the IaaS OpenStack rival to Apache after acquiring it from Cloud.com in 2011, doesn’t have much, if any, control over it although it offers a commercial version of the widgetry.
CloudStack now has more contributors than just Citrix engineers and can support more than 30,000 nodes spread over different locations. Its next 4.1 release is supposed to let the stuff split a cloud deployment across multiple regions à la Amazon, make management easier and use Amazon S3 for secondary storage.
Cloud Conversations: AWS EBS, Glacier and S3 Overview | Part 2 S3
Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently added EBS Optimized support for enhanced bandwidth EC2 instances (read more here). This industry trends and perspective cloud conversation is the second (looking at S3) in a three part series companion to the AWS EBS optimized post found here. Part I is here (closer look at EBS) and part III is here (tying it all together).
For those not familiar, Simple Storage Services (S3), Glacier and Elastic Block Storage (EBS) are part of the AWS cloud storage portfolio of services. With S3, you specify a region where a bucket is created that will contain objects that can be written, read, listed and deleted. You can create multiple buckets in a region with unlimited number of objects ranging from 1 byte to 5 Tbytes in size per bucket. Each object has a unique, user or developer assigned access key. In addition to indicating which AWS region, S3 buckets and objects are provisioned using different levels of availability, durability, SLA’s and costs (view S3 SLAs here).
Cloud backup is a great business opportunity, but is it for you?
By Pavan Vyas, Product Marketing Manager, Asigra
As you look to expand your managed service practice, should you be looking at offering cloud services, specifically cloud backup? With the rapid growth of both structured and unstructured data taking place in organizations today, companies are struggling with protecting this data. In specific verticals such as financial services and healthcare, organizations must even have a data protection strategy in place for compliance purposes. These data points may cause you to have a number of questions – the foremost being – Is offering cloud backup and recovery services lucrative? Can I make money offering cloud backup services? The answer to both those questions is “Yes”.
In this blog post, I am going to provide you with some tips and point you to a great resource that can help you with taking this all important business decision. As a company that has helped numerous service providers across the world make the move to the cloud and build successful cloud backup and recovery services using our enterprise software platform, we know that the cloud backup market is not for everyone. So, who makes an ideal candidate for offering cloud backup services? How do you decide if it is the right business venture for you?
As always the first step in any such process is, understanding your current business situation and your customers’ needs. There are about seven critical questions that you should be asking yourself such as “Do you have customers in highly regulated industries”? or “On an average how much incremental backup data do your customers generate each month?”. You can find those questions in this paper titled “Assessing your cloud backup opportunity”. As you go through this assessment, not only will you determine if offering cloud backup services is right for your business, you will also uncover new ways of thinking about your customers. This can help you grow your business with your existing customers, develop strategies for attracting new customers and obtain higher levels of customer satisfaction.
In this process of self discovery, if you ever need any help in understanding where you stand vis-à-vis your customers’ needs, we suggest that you reach out to some of your largest and trusted customers. By engaging them through surveys, interviews, or even one-on-one discussions, you can get any data points that you don’t have or answer questions that you are struggling with by yourself.
As important as it is that cloud backup services make sense to your customers, it is also critical that cloud backup services fit in with the rest of your practice today – both technologically and psychologically. It is essential that your customers can feel comfortable in trusting you to keep their critical business data – the lifeblood of their business – safe. It is also important that their current experience in working with you paves the way towards their having that confidence in you. We have a set of questions that can help you determine if cloud backup fits in well with your existing business and if this is the right time for you to proceed on making it a core component of your service offerings. Make sure to spend some time thinking through those questions.
Cloud backup managed services offers tremendous opportunities for service providers like you. We can vouch for this based on the experience of service providers in our own ecosystem. We are sure our paper will help you make the right business decisions about entering the cloud backup and recovery market, just like it has done for so many of our hybrid partners over the decades!
Benefits of Cloud Computing
Technology has been taken over by the Cloud. Putting it in simple terms, ‘Cloud’ is the new meme used to describe nirvana from clogged up computers and saving files directly to the internet. So how does it work?
Essentially, instead of saving files to a hard disk or using software on a computer that is directly installed, the Cloud offers the ability to quickly and easily access these files using an Internet connection. It all sounds very swish, but what actually are the benefits?
Services that offer Cloud storage can provide businesses with the storage space that they simply wouldn’t otherwise have access to. As storage is provided using a vast remote server, businesses can pay a relatively small amount of money (compared to the relevant cost of physical hardware) to receive a phenomenal amount of storage space.
NJVC Cloudcuity Management Portal Provides Secure Cloud Brokerage Services
NJVC® will lead efforts to provide secure cloud brokerage services to the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium using its first-to-market CloudcuityTM Management Portal during a series of 2013 geospatial community cloud demonstrations that will be conducted on behalf of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). NJVC’s partners are The Aerospace Corporation, The Boeing Company and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).
“NJVC is honored that NCOIC chose the Cloudcuity Management Portal as its brokerage of choice to offer cloud services to the geospatial community,” said Kevin L. Jackson, vice president and general manager of NJVC Cloudcuity. “This NCOIC demonstration is significant as it will represent a new procurement model for the geospatial community, which is at the frontlines of protecting and responding to national and international crises in times of conflict. Procurement of cloud services will be less complicated, making deployments to the cloud easier and more efficient than ever before. This will benefit first responders and other non-traditional NGA users.”
The nephew effect on SMB IT
By Adam Bogobowicz, Sr. Director of Product Marketing for Service Providers, Parallels
Just like I normally do, last Friday I went to Big-Bob’s-Cuts for my quarterly haircut. During the haircut Bob and I usually have a conversation about his IT infrastructure. I like to keep an eye on changes in the small business IT, and it keeps Bob away from discussing his gout problems.
On previous occasions it was a short conversation, just about matching the trim time, since Bob’s IT was composed of a cellphone, a notepad (made of paper) and a credit card reader. But not this Friday, as Bob apparently has decided to join the 21st century.
Even before plugging in his trimmer, Bob proudly announced to me that he went online! At this point I fully expected that he would have an account with a local hoster and a website in a shared hosting environment with a big picture of Bob and his phone number. But I underestimated Ralphy, his 16 year old nephew.
If you are a hoster you must be thinking that Ralph got Big Bob’s Cuts into a VPS or a cloud server, installed Panel software on it and using Application Marketplace installed all the apps needed for Bob to conduct his business online.
Well, not exactly. Apparently brought up on iPhones, Facebook and Xbox, Ralph does not know anything about hosting, panels or SMB applications. Instead Ralph created a full SMB IT infrastructure for Bob out of an iPad and a few SaaS services he found via Google.
First Ralphy got rid of the Bob’s notepad with services from https://www.schedulicity.com/ (well not really, notepad was still there …) and at the same time got Bob’s Cuts into an online catalog of services. Next he took care of in-shop payments by attaching a card reader to an iPad https://squareup.com/ which also got rid of all the paper (except Bob’s notepad) in the shop.
But that is not all; he then used http://www.bigcommerce.com/ not only to setup a website but to also setup a store featuring Bob’s famous $3.99 shampoo and shaving cream bundle. I am a bit skeptical of success for this venture, but hey, it costs $25 / month, so it breaks even with just a few dozen sales and he already got one after my shopping spree. $3.99 is a really good deal, you should try it out.
I wrote this blog because I finally understood why small businesses are not buying (more) apps from hosters. They do not need or want apps. Instead small businesses are choosing solutions to their business problems on the web. Solutions not separate applications that may or may not work together.
SaaS providers are a serious challenge to our industry and we cannot ignore them or pretend that they represent a different market. These companies exemplify precisely how the one trillion dollars of SMB spend will be distributed.
So far from ignoring, traditional hosters need to learn from them and incorporate best ideas from these new players into how we conduct business online. Here are a few things that I see hosters should borrow from the likes of Bigcommerce and Schedulicity.
- Focus on small business problem you are solving and not on memory, CPU, cores or storage. Do you think Bob or Ralphy care?
- Make it simple. The SMB IT admins are sons and nephews much more often than paid-by-the- hour system integrators. If Ralph cannot set it up for Bob, your business prospects are limited.
- Showcase your solution. Go to schedulicity.com and see the home page of this service. It is not about hosting. It is all about customers. Go to Bigcommerce.com and see customer stories on the home page. And read my previous blog on differentiation. What Bigcommerce is doing is differentiation through customer stories. Brilliant.
Full disclosure, Bigcommerce.com is using Parallels Plesk Panel as infrastructure for delivering its solution and Parallels is not associated with the other two solutions mentioned.