Amazon Web Services is now offering new features for customers looking to run high-performance databases in the cloud by launching Elastic Block Store (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 specify both volume size and volume performance, and EBS will consistently deliver the desired performance over the lifetime of the volume.
Provisioned IOPS volumes are engineered so customers can develop, test and deploy production applications and get their desired performance.
Check on In and Eat This Dog Food
Jim Barksdale is a pretty quotable guy, work for him for a few years like I did at Netscape and you leave with a small library of “Barksdalisms” that just stick with you. One of Jim’s sayings was, “It ain’t dogfood unless the dog comes off the porch to eat it…”.
While Jim was making the point that you can love your product, but if the customers doesn’t buy it it ain’t worth much. Let’s take a look at a few cool examples of this…
Ever feel like escaping the doldrums of your computer, sitting down by a mountain lake and skipping stones? Sounds like fun. That’s exactly the experience that the SkipTown promo for Sun Valley created by San Francisco design firm 11 did. And while Skippy has since retired, check out the video of the world’s first (and maybe only?) web controlled stone skipping robot from Sun Valley Idaho.
Cloud Computing: Savvis Buying Part of Ciber
Savvis is buying parts of Ciber’s global IT Outsourcing (ITO) business for $7 million in cash plus a cash earn-out payment based on performance through December 2013.
It’s supposed to expand Savvis’ application management services and help desk support.
The acquisition includes client and vendor relationships, infrastructure, technology and facilities in several countries.
Savvis expects to hire the approximately 750 people who currently support Ciber’s global ITO business. Savvis plans to provide ITO clients with continued IT outsourcing support besides offering its enhanced capabilities, including cloud services.
Gazzang and DataStax Partner to Deliver Robust Data Security for Big Data
Gazzang and DataStax, the commercial leader in Apache Cassandra, have announced a partnership that will help customers meet data security compliance regulations and guard against unauthorized data access or malicious attack, while comprehensively managing their Big Data. As part of the partnership, Gazzang zNcrypt is now available as an integrated data security solution for DataStax Enterprise customers, allowing data to be secured when at rest.
“As we see increased enterprise adoption of NoSQL databases, issues such as data security are going to become increasingly important,” commented Matt Aslett, research management, data management and analytics, 451 Research. “Partnerships such as the one struck by DataStax and Gazzang will ensure users are able to combine the flexibility of distributed unstructured data management with the encryption and access control capabilities of zNcrypt.”
“Gazzang gives DataStax customers peace of mind, knowing the sensitive information they use to run massive-scale queries and analytics is secure,” said Larry Warnock, president and CEO of Gazzang. “Because zNcrypt is optimized for cloud and big data environments, there is no tradeoff between security and performance. This means DataStax Enterprise customers can have the best of both worlds: fast data and maximum protection.”
A Sixth Thing CIOs Should Know About Big Data
Recently, IDG’s Joab Jackson of IDG wrote a piece titled, Five Things CIO’s Should Know About Big Data. Amid the slew of articles offering advice on Big Data, this particular one stood out because of how absolutely spot on it was. Of course we couldn’t stop at just five.
You will need to think about big data. What we’re seeing now is that the price of entry to big data, at least from a CapEx standpoint, is pretty low. Open source tools like Hadoop, Cassandra, MongoDB, MapReduce and others, combined with the relatively low price of cloud computing, means organizations that may not have been inclined to collect, store and analyze their data volumes are now more willing and able to do so.
Cat-Proof Your Computer (Infographic)
Cloud Computing and the Olympics
The London Olympics are not using the Cloud. Cloud seems a good match for the Olympics for provisioning a scalable and on demand architecture quickly, and then taking it down after the event. That is precisely what the technology supports. The integration and deployment of the infrastructure for the Olympics is a big program with hundreds of servers due to the various events and related technology needed to support them. This can cause technologists to take a more conservative path to manage risks and stick to utilizing existing technologies.
An event like the Olympics does put a strain on the network bandwidth. To compound this issue, there is heavy use of twitter and test messages. A lot of this was anticipated and hence some media and entertainment organizations that report on the events are using Cloud based conferencing capabilities to share information and utilize the on demand, easy provisioning aspects of the Cloud. Some Cloud providers are providing data and applications during the time when there will be increased demand for bandwidth and to ensure business continuity for organizations. There are many organizations where workers are logging in remotely to avoid the traffic and rush and Cloud supports these aspects. Such remote access applications have been quite popular due to the substantial benefits they offer.
Big Data Knows You Had Leftover Chicken for Dinner Last Night
There are no shortage of bold, sometimes inane, headlines related to Big Data.
In just the past 15 minutes, I ran across these two unrelated articles on my #bigdata Twitter feed.
Big Data Knows What You’re Doing Right Now
Wow! Twitter can tell you when you are going to get sick.
One of my favorite things about Big Data are the ridiculous blog headlines you can craft, simply by playing off the newness and lack of understanding around what Big Data is.
Take the first article for example. Time Magazine posits that aggregators are collecting a boatload of sensitive information about each and every one of us. Every time we accept a privacy policy or log in to Facebook or play an iPad app, a shadowy organization learns something new about us as individuals, powered of course by big data.
Sounds scary right?
Cloud Computing: Rackspace Kicks Off the OpenStack Cloud Roll-Out
Despite its reported immaturity, Rackspace has gone production with the Essex version of OpenStack, making it the first large-scale public cloud deployment of the fabled open source platform.
It’s positioning Open Cloud as freeing users from vendor lock-in, a taunt directed at Amazon, Google and Microsoft whose customers it expects to run off.
Other OpenStack clouds should follow quickly, say, from HP, Dell and Intel, and since they’ll be look-a-likes users able to flit from one to another.
To get the roll-out started Rackspace is offering public, private and hybrid hosting solutions and says there’s unlimited availability of Cloud Databases and both Linux and Windows Cloud Servers on OpenStack.
Some mojo called RackConnect will integrate public and private clouds.
Lenovo and EMC Now Strategic Partners
In a rare outreach Lenovo has teamed up with EMC, which will get another entry into the vast Chinese market through its new partner.
The pair is going to form an SMB-focused storage joint venture.
They’ve also got a server technology development program to extend Lenovo’s nascent capabilities in the x86 server segment. The servers will be brought to market by Lenovo and embedded into selected EMC storage systems over time. It could threaten HP.