Cool and disturbing at the same time. A fully interactive version can be found here where you can click each circle to get more information. I thought about adding all the numbers but stopped at 140,621,000 between 2012 and 2013.
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.
Enabling High-Efficiency Storage Solutions
Increasing the I/O performance of next-generation data centers and cloud computing environments is essential for supporting enterprise e-commerce, database and email applications. To successfully deploy high-performance storage, it’s essential for storage appliance software to be flash-aware and maximize solid-state drives (SSDs) for performance and hard disk drives (HDDs) for capacity, enabling an optimum price-performance storage solution.
With the explosive growth in and demand for information, next-generation data centers and cloud deployments require cost-effective storage solutions that provide end users with a high quality of service (QoS) in accessing and manipulating data. Usually, data centers – either corporate or cloud-based – run specific applications, such as database indexing and email exchanges. To provide a top QoS, these applications typically run on servers with high input/output operations per second (IOPS) and in turn provide access to data stored within the storage system.
Breaking Through the SaaS Ceiling
It’s the dream of every Internet entrepreneur to build a business that goes viral. Yet the sad truth is that most do not. It’s hard to think of any other industry with such a winner-take-all mentality as Internet software. The volatile combination of small market entry costs and big network effects creates wave after wave of disruption and consolidation, and quite a few millionaires along the way. Alas, virality is an elusive goal, particularly in SaaS. For this reason, SaaS Don’t #10 insists that you should not depend on network effects. Instead you should focus first and foremost on satisfying each and every single customer. But, if you’ve done that…bring on the hockey stick!
This is the fourth post in a series that paves the path to sustainable SaaS growth. The first post in this SaaS growth series introduced the concept of the SaaS growth ceiling, as well as the three fundamental SaaS marketing levers for breaking through it: customer acquisition, customer lifetime value and viral customer network effects. This installment explores the third, final and most funnest SaaS marketing lever: network effects, offering three proven SaaS marketing strategies to drive SaaS growth by getting your customers to sell themselves.
Breaking Through the SaaS Ceiling
It’s the dream of every Internet entrepreneur to build a business that goes viral. Yet the sad truth is that most do not. It’s hard to think of any other industry with such a winner-take-all mentality as Internet software. The volatile combination of small market entry costs and big network effects creates wave after wave of disruption and consolidation, and quite a few millionaires along the way. Alas, virality is an elusive goal, particularly in SaaS. For this reason, SaaS Don’t #10 insists that you should not depend on network effects. Instead you should focus first and foremost on satisfying each and every single customer. But, if you’ve done that…bring on the hockey stick!
This is the fourth post in a series that paves the path to sustainable SaaS growth. The first post in this SaaS growth series introduced the concept of the SaaS growth ceiling, as well as the three fundamental SaaS marketing levers for breaking through it: customer acquisition, customer lifetime value and viral customer network effects. This installment explores the third, final and most funnest SaaS marketing lever: network effects, offering three proven SaaS marketing strategies to drive SaaS growth by getting your customers to sell themselves.
Cloud PBX Services Poised to Take Off
by John McMillan, Director, Partner Business Consulting, Parallels
SMBs make up 99% of businesses worldwide, and they are adopting cloud services. According to Parallels SMB Cloud Insights™ research, the most commonly adopted cloud services include: web hosting, security add-ons, and a wide range of SMB-focused SaaS applications. Parallels research predicts that, on average, SMBs will have seven cloud services by end of 2016, growing from four services consumed today.
One service that will enjoy broad SMB adoption is cloud PBX. Cloud PBX services are a classic example of the cloud’s transformational impact on the SMB segment, allowing SMBs to have access to an enterprise-class communications experience without the overhead cost and maintenance of a traditional in-house PBX system. Cloud PBX typically includes mobile integrations, an automated attendant, and web conferencing – all packaged and priced for SMBs.
In the US, up to 50% of SMBs who have an existing in-house PBX system today and up to 30% who have regular land-lines are interested in switching to cloud PBX services. It is easy to see why – cloud PBX services are a good solution for the following key SMB needs:
1) Projecting a professional, enterprise-like image by providing a single phone number for the business, extensions for employees, and simple call routing.
2) Increasing customer intimacy by quickly connecting clients to the right resource using an automated attendant.
3) Increasing worker productivity by extending cloud PBX features to mobile devices, providing anytime, anywhere communications with customers, partners and employees.
In conclusion, cloud PBX services are poised to gain broad adoption in the SMB segment, as more cloud service providers add them to their SaaS portfolios, and SMBs widely recognize the impact that cloud PBX can have on their business and customer experience.
Beware of the Accidental Cloud Architecture
Prior to service-oriented architecture (SOA), many companies suffered from the infamous “accidental architecture” which evolved as a result of accumulating a large number of point-to-point application integration connections. Unless IT takes a strong role ensuring Software as a Service (SaaS) purchases by lines of business (LOB) integrate easily with the existing infrastructure, history is likely to repeat itself by reversing the benefits of SOA with a new form of chaos called the “accidental cloud architecture”
In this Q&A, Oracle’s Bruce Tierney, a director of Oracle SOA Suite, will outline a number of best practices businesses can adopt to avoid creating the accidental cloud architecture. Bruce will also explain how organizations can best leverage SOA and BPM technologies to create an optimal hybrid on-premise/private/public cloud infrastructure.
Can a Dedicated Server Equate to an Immediate Performance Boost?
Performance is your website’s first impression to visitors. Almost 50% of users expect a web page to load within two seconds. The move from a shared server to a dedicated server can alleviate many of a website’s performance issues and improve overall revenue and user experience.
Shared hosting, by contrast, has hundreds of other websites on the same server. All bandwidth, server memory, hard drive space and CPU cycles are shared with other website owners. Database servers are also shared with these hundreds of other site owners. The result can be a bottleneck at the server-level.
Dedicated servers are leased or fully purchased machines completely controlled by the webmaster. All server resources and databases are dedicated to the one business. Bandwidth, which plays a major role in how quickly a page loads, is also dedicated to the server, so no other website traffic interferes with the business’ traffic.
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.
How to Protect Against Your Cloud Storage Provider’s Demise
This week’s news about cloud storage provider (CSP) Nirvanix has lots of organizations thinking about and, in some cases scrambling to deal with, the repercussions of a cloud provider shutting down. While pundits may speculate about what happened to this particular CSP and ponder the various «what-if» scenarios of how the outcome might have been different, such analyses offer little consolation to the customers who are affected by this sudden change and loss of their trusted cloud vendor.
Adding to the hysterics, cloud opponents on the sideline may find time to revel in the momentary superiority of traditional IT infrastructure which is unaffected by such disruptions. However, those who understand the intrinsic value of cloud storage solutions and have been perceptive of prior happenings in the cloud industry may recall this week’s incident is not unique, as a major vendor shut down their CSP services over three years ago. Instead, they may ask whether the events of three years ago have improved the ability of customers to react to an event of this nature.