“From punched cards to disks, from CDs to SSDs, impressive technological progress has enabled us to store more and more data – and access it with increasing speed. But how well do you know these storage devices that make our lives so much easier?”
Tech Week Europe has an online quiz to test your knowledge.
DigitalOcean, a New York-based cloud server and hosting provider has launched a commission-based customer referral program. The plan is accessible to registered DigitalOcean customers and will compensate them with a $10 commission for each newly acquired customer that totals $10 in billing. Registered users are provided with their own unique referral code link that allows them to track the customers they’ve brought in, as well as their commission totals.
Boasting over 190,000 Linux–based cloud servers launched since inception, DigitalOcean is a TechStars startup accelerator graduate. Each SSD “Droplet” — the company term for its cloud servers — provides disk and network performance, coupled with the capability to easily migrate and resize existing Droplets with a single click.
“We love listening to our customers and our new referral program is one way we can give back,” says Ben Uretsky, CEO of DigitalOcean. “Referrals have been a huge driver of success for DigitalOcean. We want to give back to our loyal customers by rewarding them for continuing to spread the word and help our business grow.”
Additional cloud hosting plans include options ranging from the initial 512 MB of RAM starting at $5 per month, to a maximum of capacity of96 GB of RAM and 10 TB of bandwidth transfer.
Wired has a cautionary tale for you to read as you consider the perils as well as the promise of could computing.
New York startup DigitalOcean says that its cloud server platform may be leaking data between its customers.
Kenneth White stumbled across several gigabytes of someone else’s data when he was noodling around on DigitalOcean’s service last week. White, who is chief of biomedical informatics with Social and Scientific Systems, found e-mail addresses, web links, website code and even strings that look like usernames and passwords — things like 1234qwe and 1234567passwd.
The problem started in mid-January, when DigitalOcean introduced a new solid state drive storage service. “The code that wipes the data — that securely deletes the data — was not being activated under the new SSD storage plans,” according to DigitalOcean CEO Ben Uretsky .
Read the details (and weep).
Toshiba Corporation today announced new enterprise SAS solid state drives (SSD), mobile SATA hard disk drives (HDD), including self-encrypting drive (SED) models in both product categories, and new enterprise-grade SATA SSD supporting cryptographic-erase. Select drives will start to ship in January with other models following later in the first quarter.
PX02SMQ and PX02SMU series enterprise SED (eSED) deliver government-grade Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit self-encryption and offer Trusted Computing Group (TCG) Enterprise SSC protocol self-encryption and cryptographic-erase support. These high-performance, 2.5 inch enterprise models with SAS interface, target high-end servers and data center applications and provide capacities ranging up to 1.6TB[1].
The PX02AMU value line of SATA eSSD models and the PX03ANU read-intensive line of SATA eSSD models, both for enterprise applications, feature cryptographic- erase for fast and secure media sanitization.
For mobile computing, the MQ01ABU***W series provides self-encryption, cryptographic-erase and TCG-Opal SSC protocol support in a slim 7mm height with up to 500GB[1] of storage capacity. The MQ01ABU***W series also supports Toshiba’s innovative Wipe technology, which adds security features that allows system designers to automatically cryptographic-erase sensitive user data if an unexpected host attempts to access the HDDs or if a defined number of authentication failures occurs.
Toshiba is also reportedly working on FIPS 140-2 certification[2] for select SED products to meet government-class security requirements.
Today, Rackspace Hosting announced the unlimited availability of Cloud Block Storage, powered by OpenStack®. This solution provides a superior approach to attached storage in the Cloud by addressing customer demand for consistent and affordable performance for file systems, databases and other input/output (I/O) intensive applications. Rackspace Cloud Block Storage offers a standard volume option for everyday storage with performance that has been tested to be at least 30 percent less variable than that of alternatives1. The new product’s Solid State Drive (SSD) volume option has also been tested to deliver even higher performance, 5x to 6x faster than competing solutions1. Both options feature a transparent, flat pricing structure with no charge for I/O, and are now available for Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack.
“The Rackspace Cloud Block Storage solution is a crucial piece of our product portfolio,” said John Engates, CTO of Rackspace. “The explosion of data over the past few years has placed greater demands on our customers, presenting them with a variety of new storage related challenges. We developed Cloud Block Storage to deliver consistent performance in the cloud, with a very simple pricing model that gives customers the flexibility they require to meet their unique business needs.”
With Rackspace Cloud Block Storage, customers get:
A Full-Featured Attachable Storage Solution
Enhanced Performance
A Simple Pricing Model
No Vendor Lock-In
Standard volumes are aimed at customers that typically require large amounts of everyday storage. These customers can leverage the product for a broad range of applications, including those that require standard performance or those needing to scale storage without scaling compute nodes. In addition, the product provides dependable storage for archiving solutions, companies that access large quantities of large files, and small to medium size websites.
Rackspace Cloud Block Storage SSD volumes are ideally suited for customers that require even higher levels of performance than what is normally experienced with standard drives. With a faster and more reliable SSD-based storage solution, customers can be better equipped to use applications that are crucial to their business, such as self-managed MySQL databases, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Web caching and indexing, among others.
“Based on our internal benchmarks, we’ve been impressed with the ability of Rackspace Cloud Block Storage to steadily perform at a high level,” said Greg Arnette, CTO at Sonian Inc. “For our customers, the capacity to effectively archive large amounts of email data is critical to their business. As a result, we look for storage solutions that give us maximum agility, scalability and enterprise readiness. We are excited that Rackspace is now providing a new block storage alternative service for running our large scale email archiving deployments.”
Cloud Block Storage joins Cloud Databases as a key solution in Rackspace’s expanding portfolio of storage products. Rackspace Cloud Block Storage is now available in the U.S. and UK. For more information, visit http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/public/blockstorage/
1 The data provided results from performance benchmarking tests that were commissioned by Rackspace. More information is available at: http://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloud-block-storage/.
