Archivo de la categoría: Storage

Big Data, Data center, Facebook, Green, Hardware, Oregon, Prineville Oregon, Social, Storage

Take a Photo Tour of Facebook’s Amazing Cold Storage Datacenter

There’s a fascinating photo tour of Facebook’s Oregon data center on readwrite today.

Facebook (arguably) owns more data than God.

But how to store a cache of user data collected at the scale of omniscience? If you’re Facebook, just build another custom-crafted server storage locker roughly the size of the USS Abraham Lincoln on top of a breezy plateau in the Oregon high desert. The company’s new Prineville, Ore., data center employs an ultra-green ”cold storage” plan designed from the ground up to meet its unique—and uniquely huge—needs.

The piece also includes useful links on the tech behind the data center, shingled drive tech, and the Open Compute project that led to the innovations on display here.

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:

Chapter 11 Title 11 United States Code, Nirvanix, Storage

Stormy Weather: Cloud Storage Vendor Nirvanix Files for Chapter 11

Nirvanix yesterday filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

According to an announcement on their website:

“We have an agreement with IBM, and a team from IBM is ready to help you. In addition, we have established a higher speed connection with some companies to increase the rate of data transfer from Nirvanix to their servers.”

Customers have until October 15 to move their data elsewhere.

Read earlier posts on the Nirvanix shutdown: the what and the why.

 

Bitrix, Bitrix24, Collaboration, Content Management, Customer Relationship Management, Document Management, Messaging, Mobile, Social, Storage

Bitrix24 Collaboration for SMBs Update Supports Online Document Creation, Sharing

Bitrix has released a new version of Bitrix24, its free enterprise social network and collaboration suite for small businesses. The new release allows users to create, edit and collaborate on documents online, without having MS Office suite installed on their personal computers.

In addition to using Bitrix24 instant messenger for video and group chats, users now have access to video conferencing and screen sharing capabilities. Email connectors to MS Exchange, Outlook, Gmail, AOL, Yahoo!, iCloud and other popular e-mail services have been added to enable e-mail access from Bitrix24 accounts.

Activity Stream has been enhanced with real time updates, smart forwarding, notification options and company-wide announcements, while engagement analytics module (Company Pulse) has been added to provide real time indicators for enterprise social network adoption, identify roadblocks and slow adopters, and show which intranet tools are currently being (under)used by employees.

Bitrix24 has also released a fully functional mobile CRM, which allows creation or editing of CRM entries and invoices directly from the mobile device. The new mobile app also allows using multiple Bitrix24 accounts from a single smartphone or tablet.

“2013 has been a year of significant growth for us, – said Bitrix24 CEO Dmitry Valyanov, – we’ve signed up 90,000 companies, which is well over 500,000 users for the cloud and onsite versions of Bitrix24 intranet. Our workforce grew by 40% to over 130 employees and we opened three new sales and support offices. GooglePlay now lists Bitrix24 among the top 5 mobile intranet apps, along with or surpassing such established enterprise social brands as Jive Software, IBM Connection, VMWare SocialCast and TIBCO Tibbr. We hope to have a million users by the end of the year.”

Bitrix24 is 100% free to any company or organization with up to 12 employees. Bitrix24 paid cloud plans are priced at $99/mo (50 GB) and $199/mo (100 GB), and both come with unlimited users.

Cloudian, Partnerships, Storage, Storage Made Easy

Cloudian, Storage Made Easy Partnered for Universal File Search

Storage Made Easy has partnered with Cloudian to enable Cloudian customers to access their cloud files no matter their device or location.

Cloudian is an Amazon S3-compliant cloud object storage platform that enables service providers and enterprises to build reliable, affordable and scalable cloud storage solutions. With this new integration, Cloudian’s clients can use Storage Made Easy’s technology to synchronize all their storage locations – cloud, NAS/SAN, network, and local, with any device, ensuring easy search and access.

Storage Made Easy unites public, private and SaaS data into a single, secure environment, guaranteeing file access and cross-service search; it is pre-integrated into existing identity management systems such as Active Directory and LDAP. Storage Made Easy provides a comprehensive unified Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS) solution built on top of the SME Cloud Control Gateway. Offered either a SaaS or as a hybrid on-premise solution, it delivers the highest levels of management, security, compliance, audit, and access services for corporate data.

Amazon AWS, EVault, Hard disk drive, Hardware, Magnetic storage, Seagate, Seagate Technology, Storage

Seagate’s eVault Reportedly Developing New “Cold Storage” Tech to Compete with AWS Glacier

Very interesting, though somewhat speculative, article today in The Register that outlines some new technology that may make a disk-based competitor to Amazon’s Glacier as cheap but faster:

“EVault, according to our storage gossips, is going to use disks, next-generation slow and energy-efficient drives from parent Seagate, probably shingled magnetic recording drives, and thus be able to generate restores which are potentially faster than those achieved on Glacier.”

For details and full-on speculation, read the article.

Amazon, Amazon AWS, Azure, Cloud Storage, File hosting service, Google, Microsoft, Nirvanix, Storage, Venture Funding

Nirvanix Shutdown: Collateral Damage in Big Players’ Price War?

The sudden shutdown of Nirvanix, an early but recently faltering participant in the “pure-play” Online Storage space dominated by the likes of AWS S3, Microsoft Azure and Google, is in large part a result of downward pressure on prices as the big players continually lower theirs. Amazon, for instance, launched S3 in 2006 and charged $0.15 per gigabyte-month. After many step-wise price cuts S3 is down to $0.095 per gigabyte-month.

Pure online storage is fast becoming the sole province of vendors who either enjoy economies of scale, or who treat their offerings as a loss-leader to get other business (or a combination of both).

Smaller players may have to add value in other ways to survive. Nirvanix was not profitable, and when their latest round of funding came up short it was the last nail in their coffin.

Amazon AWS, Amazon Glacier, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, Riverbed Technology, Storage, Whitewater

Riverbed Upgrades Storage Appliances, Seeks to Leverage Amazon Glacier Backup

Riverbed Technology today announced it has expanded its Whitewater cloud storage appliance family with the addition of new hardware models and upgrades to its operating system. The new Riverbed Whitewater appliances and OS provide more capacity, faster ingest speeds and more replication options. These features and capabilities make the new Whitewater appliances a critical component for enterprises wishing to leverage the economical price and reliability of cloud storage options such as Amazon Glacier.

Enhancements include new Whitewater model appliances with up to triple the cache of previous models and support of up to 14.4 petabytes of logical data. The Whitewater Operating System (WWOS) 3.0 also offers new features, including pairwise replication that enable enterprises to replicate to an additional Whitewater appliance at a secondary location. In addition, enterprises can now leverage the 10 gigabit networking interface that dramatically improves ingest performance.

Customers that deploy the Whitewater 3030 model appliance can save more than $750,000 over a three year period when backing up to Amazon Glacier. With varying requirements for recovery time objectives (RTO) of certain data sets, the ability to recover certain data sets locally and immediately has also become increasingly important.

The new WWOS 3.0 offers support for pairwise replication for Whitewater appliances that allows enterprises greater flexibility to choose the appropriate recovery option to meet their RTO based on their business continuity plans. For the fastest RTO, a Whitewater appliance can recover at disk speed to a secondary site. In addition, the new OS offers a pinning feature that allows enterprises to tier and choose which backup data sets are available on the Whitewater appliance cache for immediate access, while less critical backup data sets can be recovered from the cloud.

The three new Whitewater model (730, 2030, 3030) appliances offer between 8 to 96 TB usable cache capacity. The largest model, WWA-3030, can cache up to three times the amount of data as the previous largest model (3010) and can support backup & archive datasets of up to 14.4 petabytes[1] before it is compressed and deduplicated onto the local cache.

For faster performance, enterprises can also choose to use 10 gigabit networking interfaces to get up to 2.5 terabytes per hour ingest performance, a 40 percent increase over previous models. The 10 gigabit networking interface also enables enterprises to transfer to Amazon Glacier cloud storage leveraging Amazon Direct Connect.

Collaboration, Document Management, File Sharing, File synchronization, Storage, Zoho, Zoho Docs, Zoho Office Suite

Zoho Docs Desktop App Get Two-Way File Sync

Zoho today announced it has added Zoho Docs for Desktop, adding two-way file synchronization capability to Zoho Docs, the company’s online document management application with integrated online office suite. Zoho Docs users can now synchronize files on their local Windows, Mac and Linux desktop and laptop computers with the cloud as well as sync their cloud files with their local computers.

“Making user’s files available at all locations is an important feature of a document management system. We are happy to offer two-way file synchronization capability to Windows, Mac and Linux users,” said Raju Vegesna, Zoho evangelist. “Zoho users now get a powerful two-way file synchronization capability combined with expanded storage options and a tightly integrated online office suite, making this a unique offering for businesses.”

Zoho Docs for Desktop allows users to sync their Zoho Docs files and folders to Windows, Mac or Linux laptop or desktop computers. Users can sync all files and folders or pick specific folders to sync. With the sync folder in place on authorized computers, users will have the files available both in the Zoho Docs cloud folder as well as on their computers at the same time.

Cloud Storage, Nirvanix, Outage Alert, Storage

Online Storage Provider Nirvanix Reportedly Two Weeks From Shutdown

According to a report today in Information Age:

“US-based cloud storage provider Nirvanix tells employees it has “gone to the wall”, gives customers until the end of the month to move their data elsewhere .”

The company was founded in 2007 after an online storage company called StreamLoad split into consumer and business units. Not longer after, the consumer arm – MediaMax – gave customers one month to relocate their data following a botched migration onto the Nirvanix platform.

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