Posts Tagged ‘Cloud’
IBM Information Protection Services, a range of cloud-based managed services, includes both onsite and remote data protection capabilities for your data center servers, applications and databases, as well as protection for email, laptops and desktops, designed to help you quickly back up, restore, archive and maintain access to critical data on demand.
Vembu StoreGrid supports Parascale Cloud
a battle between two online storage apps Follow me on Twitter! twitter.com/iReviewApps100
Faster New iMacs Can Run Both SSD and HDDs at Once [Apple]
# apple Two sizes of iMac (21.5″ and 27″), both available in different processor configurations, landed today. With the base price being $1,199 for the 21.5″ 3.06GHz Core i3 model, all of the models are faster and more fine-tuned than before. More »
Read more on Gizmodo
Web Hosting Talk to Launch Cloud Performance Benchmarking Site
July 26, 2010 — Stemming from the need for objective information on competing cloud services, Web host The Planet and Web hosting community site Web Hosting Talk have announced the beta development of a free, online cloud benchmarking tool to help businesses more easily select a cloud provider.
Read more on Web Host Industry Review
Cloud Storage Adoption with Mezeo
July 19, 2010 — In the first cloud trends track session of day one at HostingCon 2010, Mezeo Software’s Steve Lesem delivered his presentation, “Cloud Storage Adoption: Public, Private, Enterprise, and Service Providers”.
Read more on Web Host Industry Review
Microsoft Helps Service Providers Capture Cloud Services Opportunities
Microsoft software and services empower service provider partners to deliver enterprise-class solutions to small and midsize businesses. WASHINGTON, July 14 – This week at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2010, Microsoft Corp. is highlighting market opportunities for hosting and communications service providers as adoption of cloud services among small and midsize business (SMBs …
Read more on ThomasNet
Hey guys, this is MacHelpTosh again here with another great app to introduce to you all. This app is CloudApp. It is an app just for Mac for simple uploads on to the CloudApp server. It acts as your own cloud that you can upload things, or download things from anywhere. You can upload it and share it with people over the internet. You can upload a PSD that you are working on and share it with your colleagues. You can do many things with it just by drag and dropping the file you want to share onto “The Cloud”. Everything is free, all you need is to sign up for an account, and download the app. What about the iDevices? There will be “an app for that!” Website: www.getcloudapp.com
BP robots slowly lowering oil cap toward Gulf leak
New Orleans — Undersea robots maneuvered a mile beneath the Gulf on Monday to delicately lower a new, tighter-fitting cap over BP’s busted well, a fix the oil giant hopes can finally stop the leak after nearly three months.
Read more on Detroit News
Ctera brings the cloud down scale
The Ctera C200 provides SAN, NAS, and cloud storage that’s simple and cost-effective.
Read more on IT World
Watch a sneak preview of Cortado’s upcoming free cloud printing solution for Nokia and Symbian smartphones. With Cortado Workplace, users will receive 1 GB free online storage to access it through their Nokia or other Symbian smartphone, PC, or laptop, putting documents and files at their fingertips anytime and anywhere. Thanks to the Cortado Workplace file manager on the smartphone, you can work while on the go just as if you were on your desktop computer. Watch out for more! Visit www.cortado.com regularly!
Cloud storage is one of the fastest-growing segments in the storage industry due to its potential for lowering costs, removing the burden of managing and protecting data, and ultimately creating a new virtual tier of online storage. It has given rise to multiple innovative architectures, and could well be a harbinger of larger nearline storage trends. In this talk, we’ll look at cloud storage architecture across multiple cloud providers, offering a detailed look at the architectural trends and innovations in cloud storage platforms, discussing how the various architectures differ from what end users have in their own data centers. We will also discuss the rise of some of the biggest breakthroughs in cloud storage, integrated content-aware compression and dedupe, which are ways of drastically reducing the space taken to store data, and also to move it across the WAN. The cloud offerings we will take a look at will be from Amazon AWS, Nirvanix, Microsoft, IBM, EMC and others. Some take-aways include: – A thorough introduction to the newest architecture innovations and features in cloud storage, helping participants make better informed business decisions regarding the most appropriate types of storage in the cloud for their specific needs. – For cloud storage vendors and those in related businesses, an understanding of the emerging potential of dedupe and content aware compression in the cloud and how these can enable vendors to offer even more aggressive and compelling …
When choosing any storage solution it’s important to consider the workload and data usage patterns. This even goes beyond storage – application workloads drive server, network and all IT infrastructure decisions. Sure, most vendors will tell you that their product is the best solution for any workload, and when choices were few, that was somewhat accurate. However, today there are many different offerings, each with strengths and weaknesses in different situations. This article will review six workload scenarios and identify where cloud storage is a good fit and where it is a poor fit.
Rapidly Changing Single File Workloads
Examples of a rapidly changing single file workload would include I/O patterns of a database, source code repository, or an active spreadsheet. In this workload there is either a very powerful single server, or many users sharing a single file. In both cases, updates to a single file are constant and rapid, driving the need for a tier-one class of storage. To facilitate this workload, the system should have lots of memory; fast, hard drives; and the ability to create snapshots for instant data protection. Today this market is well served by Enterprise NAS vendors such as EMC and NetApp.
Data Ingestion Workloads
The best example of a data ingestion workload is video surveillance. Consider, for example, the city of London and its thousands of cameras, each streaming write operations to storage. Every camera creates its own set of files and needs fast access to storage. This is an excellent workload for private cloud storage. A private storage cloud has many storage nodes that can ingest streams of information independently so there is no data bottleneck. A camera-to-storage node ratio can be established, say 10 cameras per node, and then replicated out to hundreds of nodes, and enabling thousands of cameras. Since the cloud is centrally managed, a single administrator can easily manage the video surveillance storage for the entire city.
Read-Intensive Workloads
Video streaming and online video sharing are categorized as read-intensive workloads. Consider the example of the Beijing Olympics last summer. There was unbelievable demand for online video of the events, and in the U.S. the focus was on men’s swimming. When the U.S. relay team won by a fraction of a second, everybody wanted to watch. Millions of people flocked to the web and video servers churned out views. This creates a unique storage demand. With thousands of web servers trying to read a single file, the architecture must support parallel reads. With hundreds of independent nodes serving out many copies of the same file, cloud storage provides the ideal solution to read intensive workloads.
High Performance Computing (HPC) Workloads
HPC workloads are similar to data ingestion workloads with one important difference – access to a single file. Rather than every client creating a unique file, hundreds or thousands of systems access a single file that is striped across many nodes for performance. This workload requires tight coordination between every node in the cluster to ensure data integrity, file locking, and cache coherence. HPC storage is used extensively in oil and gas exploration and financial data modeling where complex transactions are processed by compute clusters. There are a number of established HPC storage vendors include Panasas, Isilon and NetApp GX.
Single Producer, Many Consumer Workloads
In June 2008, the NASA Phoenix Mars Lander discovered ice crystals on the surface of Mars. The world reacted, scientists and religious organizations confirmed their unique theories about the universe, and everybody wanted access to the data. Given the challenges of landing on Mars and collecting soil samples, it’s safe to say this is an example of a write once, consume many workload. Other examples include genomic sequence findings and quarterly business results. All share a single creation event with demand for multiple points of read access. Cloud storage protects data by replicating files to one or more nodes. This same activity can create many access points, enabling a single creation event to be easily shared amongst many consumers.
Archive or Content Depot Workloads
In most cases as data ages it becomes less active. Whether it is corporate information or media content, it is important that this data be kept available, but at a cost relative to its value. Private cloud storage economics and scale capabilities are designed to address this use case. Data can be copied to the cloud to free up more expensive tier-one storage devices and delay costly infrastructure upgrades. Cloud storage can be expanded on demand using the latest (or oldest) commodity hardware and a few simple mouse clicks. When it comes time to retire cloud hardware, it can be removed without downtime, preserving access and enabling 50 year archives.
What Is Your Data Workload?
When considering storage choices, ignore the “we can do everything” vendors and think about your workload. Once you understand your requirements and how the data will be used, your answer will emerge.
Mike Maxey is director of product management for ParaScale, a Silicon Valley startup focused on addressing the exploding bulk storage requirements for digital content and archival data.