Category Archives: Research

Amazon AWS, Facebook, Google, Hardware, Magnetic storage, Open Compute Project, Opinion, Research, Seagate Technology, Storage, Tape library

Will Disks Using Shingled Magnetic Recording Kill Tape for Cold Storage?

We previously reported on the rumored Seagate/eVault “cold storage” tech initiative seeking to use disks to supplant tape libraries.

Now come this analysis from The Register.

We know Facebook’s Open Compute Project has a cold storage vault configuration using shingled magnetic recording drives. Both Google (mail backup and more) and Amazon (Glacier) have tape vaults in their storage estate. Shingled drives could change that equation because, probably, the cost/GB of a 6TB shingled drive is a lot less that that of a 4TB drive and, over, say, 500,000 drives, that saving turns into a big sum of dollars.

What are shingled drives, you ask? This video from Seagate explains:

Education, quantum computing, qubits, Research

Cloud Computing is Dead. Long Live Quantum Cloud Computing

Qcloud “…aims to provide resources for anybody interested in quantum technologies, in particular those who want to have some practical experience of using and manipulating information using quantum computers.”

We don’t even pretend to understand quantum computing. Now it’s in the cloud?!?

The Bloch sphere is a representation of a qubit, the fundamental building block of quantum computers (source: Wikipedia).

NSA, Opinion, PRISM, Research, Snowden

Survey Shows Extent of NSA/PRISM’s Damage to US Cloud Companies

A survey by the Cloud Security Alliance  found that 56% of non-US residents were now less likely to use US-based cloud providers, in light of recent revelations about government access to customer information.

During June and July of 2013, news of a whistleblower, US government contractor Edward Snowden, dominated global headlines. Snowden provided evidence of US government access to information from telecommunications and Internet providers via secret court orders as specified by the Patriot Act. The subsequent news leaks indicated that allied governments of the US may have also received some of this information and acted upon it in unknown ways. As this news became widespread, it led to a great deal of debate and soul searching about appropriate access to an individual’s digital information, both within the United States of America and any other country.

CSA initiated this survey to collect a broad spectrum of member opinions about this news, and to understand how this impacts attitudes about using public cloud providers.

Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, AWS, Big Data Group, Cloudyn, Research, Webinar/Webcast/Presentation

Study Finds Enterprise Cloud Focus Shifting From Adoption to Optimization

Cloudyn together with The Big Data Group has released the latest AWS customer optimization data, reinforcing the positive growth trend expected for the year ahead.

“We set out to evaluate whether the projected 2013 ‘year of cloud optimization’ is on course and discovered that we are well into the public cloud adoption life cycle. In 2011 and 2012 the conversation centered around how and when to move to the cloud. Now it is all about companies looking for efficiencies and cost controls,” commented David Feinleib, Managing Director of The Big Data Group.

The study, based on over 450 selected AWS and Cloudyn customers, highlights a more mature approach to cloud deployments reflected by a deeper understanding of where inefficiencies lurk and how to optimize them. EC2 makes up for 62% of total AWS spend, with more than 50% of customers now using Reserved Instances in their deployment mix. However, On-Demand pricing remains the top choice for most, accounting for 71% of EC2 spend. Even for customers using reservations, there is still opportunity for further efficiency.

For example, Cloudyn’s Unused Reservation Detector has assisted customers in finding a startling 24% of unused reservations. These can be recycled by relocating matching On-Demand instances to the availability zone of the unused reservation.

There is also a shift away from large instance types to medium, where two medium instances cost the same as one large, but can produce 30% more output. However, with the low 8-9% utilization rates of the popular instance types, there is certainly more work to be done on the road to cloud optimization.

Cloudyn and The Big Data Group host a webinar on May 1, 2013 at 9:00 am PT focused on deployment efficiency.

Forbes, Platform Services, Private Cloud, Research, Unisphere Research

How Common are Private Clouds? How About Enterprise Use of Public Cloud Services?

Joe McKendrick, who covers technology at Forbes, has good good coverage and analysis of a new survey (pdf) just published by Unisphere Research on adoption of cloud technology by corporations:

Close to two-fifths of organizations now run private clouds in one form or another, and one-fourth are using public cloud services in an enterprise capacity. Private clouds are being extended deeper into the organizations that have them — a majority expect to be running most of their workloads in the cloud within the next 12 months, especially Platform as a Service middleware.  In addition, close to one-third of public cloud users report they are employing hosted services to run their private clouds for them.

Read the full article.

Cloud Outage, Outage Alert, Research, TeamQuest Corporation

Survey Says 40 Per Cent of IT Managers Have Suffered a Cloud Outage

According to a survey by Kelton done for TeamQuest, nearly four in ten respondents reported having suffered a cloud outage:

Many survey respondents believe the reported outages could have been prevented. Capacity management is sighted as one way to minimize the risks associated with cloud computing, according to respondents in a survey from Kelton Research, commissioned by TeamQuest Corporation.

Amazon AWS, Amazon Cloud Drive, Apple, Digital media, DropBox, Google, Icloud, Research, Storage, Strategy Analytics

Why Apple, Not Dropbox, Amazon or Google Drive, is Dominating Cloud Storage

Apple is dominating the cloud storage wars, followed by Dropbox, Amazon and Google according to Strategy Analytics ‘Cloud Media Services’ survey. Cloud storage is overwhelmingly dominated by music; around 90% of Apple, Amazon and Google’s cloud users store music. Even Dropbox – which has no associated content ecosystem – sees around 45% of its users storing music files. Dropbox’s recent acquisition of Audiogalaxy will add a much needed native music player to the platform in the coming months.

In a recent study of almost 2,300 connected Americans, Strategy Analytics found that 27% have used Apple’s iCloud followed by 17% for Dropbox, 15% for Amazon Cloud Drive and 10% for Google Play (see chart).

Usage of cloud storage is heavily skewed towards younger people, in particular 20-24 year olds, whilst Apple’s service is the only one with more female than male users. Amongst the big four, Google’s is the one most heavily skewed towards males.

“Music is currently the key battleground in the war for cloud domination. Google is tempting users by giving away free storage for 20,000 songs which can be streamed to any Android device, a feature both Amazon and Apple charge annual subscriptions for,” observes Ed Barton, Strategy Analytics’ Director of Digital Media. “However, the growth of video streaming and the desire to access content via a growing range of devices will see services such as the Hollywood-backed digital movie initiative Ultraviolet – currently used by 4% of Americans – increase market share.”

Barton continues, “The cloud’s role in the race to win over consumers’ digital media libraries has evolved from a value added service for digital content purchases to a feature-rich and increasingly device agnostic digital locker for music and movies. Dropbox being used by 1 in 6 Americans shows that an integrated content storefront isn’t essential to build a large user base, however we expect competition to intensify sharply over the coming years.”

Strategy Analytics found that, the big four cloud storage services aside, recognition of other brands was uniformly low. Furthermore 55% of connected Americans have never used a cloud storage service – although, amongst consumers who have used one, one third (33%) had done so in the last week.

“There needs to be considerable investment in evangelizing these services to a potentially willing yet largely oblivious audience,” suggests Barton. “Given the size of bet Hollywood is making with Ultraviolet, this will be essential to their success given a crowded market and widespread apathy. However, more fundamental questions remain – is the use of more than one cloud service going to be too much for consumers to handle and will consolidation in such a fragmented market become inevitable?”

Barton concludes, “Although cloud storage is fast becoming a key pillar of digital platform strategies for the world’s leading device manufacturers and digital content distributors, there’s still a lot of work to do in educating consumers – particularly those over 45. With over half of consumers yet to use any consumer cloud based service, 2013 predictions for the ‘year of the cloud’ seem unrealistic. However given the market influence of the leading players pushing the concept, in particular Apple, Amazon, Google and Ultraviolet, I won’t be surprised to see mainstream adoption and usage spike within the next two to three years in the key US market.”

Application programming interface, Cloud Security Alliance, Data loss, Denial-of-service attack, Notorious Nine, Opinion, Research

Do You Know the Top Threats to Cloud Security?

Where computing goes, trouble follows — in the form of hackers, disgruntled employees, and plain old destructive bugs. And as computing is moving to the Cloud (it says so right there in our logo!) that’s where some of the newest threats are emerging.

The Cloud Security Alliance has identified The Notorious Nine, (registration required) the top nine cloud computing threats for 2013.

Data breaches, data loss, account and traffic hijacking, insecure interfaces and APIs, denial of service attacks, malicious insiders, cloud “abuse” (using the power of the cloud to crack passwords), lack of due diligence, and shared technology platforms leading to shared vulnerabilities.