Eastern Storms Disrupt Amazon.com Data Centers
Large electrical storms on the east coast disrupted power for Amazon.com Inc. cloud-computing operations Friday night, causing outages for customers such as Netflix Inc. and photo-sharing service Instagram.
The Seattle-based online retailer operates data centers with servers that manage the Web operations of many other companies, a practice often called cloud computing. Power outages caused by catastrophic storms that blanketed the east coast affected Amazon’s operations in Virginia.
On Saturday afternoon, Amazon was still reporting performance issues for what it calls its elastic cloud compute, relational database and elastic beanstalk services. The problems appeared to have begun appearing on the site at around 11:21 p.m. EDT on Friday…
Microsoft Can Use Yammer`s ‘Freemium’ Model to Sell Office: Analyst
As Microsoft moves forward with its acquisition of enterprise social networking company Yammer, industry analysts are starting to identify opportunities for the upstart Yammer to help the software giant to make a faster transition to cloud computing.
Microsoft’s $1.2 billion deal to acquire enterprise social media company Yammer still has some people scratching their heads about the synergy the two companies will generate, but Yammer could actually teach Microsoft a thing or two, an industry analyst says.
Microsoft built its fortune by selling software licenses to computer makers, businesses and consumers. Yammer built its business into something worth paying $1.2 billion for by what’s called the “freemium” model…
Crazy Weather And The Real Cost Of Cloud Computing
What a Cloud-a-palooza! I am neither a climate scientist or cloud computing expert, but I know that many of our readers are those things and more. To me, as a commentator on how the distribution and format of content effects user experience, the Amazon cloud outage raise some really pressing questions for the technology industry. Since I have more questions than answers, I will limit myself to asking some (perhaps leading) questions and hope that our own expert cloud of readers and contributors can fill in the (perhaps contentious) details:…
Cloud computing for the people? It’s called SaaS
Cloud-based servers simple enough to be at the beck and call of every Joe Schmo off the street are a compelling vision, but presently not a realistic one. At this point, in fact, one could argue that the holy grail of the consumer cloud has already been realized. In the business world, it’s called software as a service, but the rest of the world just knows it as “the cloud.”
In a blog post on Thursday, Anil Dash laid out a vision that pretty much boils down to this quote: “[W]e need a consumer cloud offering. An app store for EC2 or a marketplace for Rackspace. The same one-click stores that offer us easy apps on our own local devices should let us purchase consumer-friendly apps that run on our own individual cloud servers.” It reads well, but until cloud computing prices drop far enough that individual servers cost next to nothing, the vision seems infeasible. That’s why multitenant cloud services, what Dash calls “centralized services,” are proving so popular….
Cisco launches Smart Wi-Fi routers with cloud computing features
Cisco has introduced new Linksys Smart Wi-Fi Routers (EA4500, EA3500 and EA2700) that deliver the latest in home Wi-Fi technology and offer a range of prices and performance. Cisco also unveiled Cisco Connect Cloud, a software platform that redefines and dramatically simplifies how consumers connect, control and interact with their connected devices, including personal entertainment and home appliances. The pricing details are as follows; the EA4500 will cost you Rs.14,999, the EA3500 will cost you 12,499 while the EA2700 will cost you 9,499.
The new routers are ideal for active online homes, easily handling everything from streaming HD video and multiplayer gaming to downloading large files, adding storage or printers and connecting multiple devices. After creating a password protected Cisco Connect Cloud account, consumers can enjoy anytime, anywhere access to multiple home networks from their mobile, tablet app or web browser and give guests Internet access, set parental controls or add new devices to their network…
TwinStrata Publishes “A Snapshot into Cloud Storage Adoption” from 2012 Cloud Computing Expo
In June, TwinStrata conducted a survey at the 2012 Cloud Computing Expo in New York to gauge the state of cloud storage among the represented organizations. The area of greatest cloud computing growth reported in the survey is cloud storage, with 46% of respondents indicating future plans to use cloud storage. Five out of six respondents indicated that they were either already using or plan to use cloud storage in some capacity.
The report is based on 101 responses from attendees, a sample which TwinStrata notes is biased towards organizations favorably disposed toward cloud computing. 73% of respondents have implemented some form of cloud computing already, with more than a quarter (28%) having done so for three or more years. The greatest adoption of cloud computing is coming from small organizations (between 51-250 employees) and large enterprises (more than 5000 employees). TwinStrata is itself an enterprise-class data storage vendor…
The Federal Government’s First Foray into Cloud Computing, Circa 1965
There’s really nothing new about federal cloud computing — other than a few zeros added to the costs.
Some 47 years ago, the US federal government was considering a secretive plan to consolidate its data centers into a single mega-center, thereby eliminating all the agency silos that were springing up.
The price tag for the new center would have been $2 million a year to start — a real bargain compared to today’s $80 billion-a-year IT budget. Details of the plan, first formulated in 1965, are offered in a paper recently presented by Rebecca S. Kraus, Ph.D. of the US Census Bureau…
More Problems for Amazon EC2 Cloud
Grazed from Data Center Knowledge. Author: Rich Miller.
Amazon Web Services is reporting another service outage this morning for some customers of its EC2 cloud computing service. Amazon has reported connectivity issues in its US-East-1 availability zone, the same zone which was hit by an outage earlier this month.
The problems began at about 10:45 a.m. Eastern time, and were confirmed by Amazon a short time later. “We can confirm network connectivity issues for some EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 region,” Amazon reported in its Service Health Dashboard. ” Customers may be experiencing impaired read/write access to their EBS (Elastic Block Storage) volumes. New instance launches are also delayed. We are applying mitigations to address the connectivity issues … and connectivity is beginning to recover.” dotCloud also reported downtime due to the AWS problems…
Former OS X chief working on cloud startup with other ex-Apple employees
Grazed from AppleInsider. Author: Sam Oliver.
Bertrand Serlet, formerly the head of OS X development at Apple, has reportedly been working with a cloud computing startup called "Upthere" since he left Apple last year.
Serlet is working with at least two other former Apple employees at the company in downtown Palo Alto, Calif., according to Business Insider. The company is described as a "cloud hosting provider" with "consulting services in the field of cloud computing."
Said to have joined Serlet at Upthere is Roger Bodamer, a former vice president of product operations and development at Apple, as well as Justin Maxwell, a former Apple user interface designer…
PaaS providers, ThroughPuter wants to parallelize your cloud
Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.
A Jersey City, N.J.-startup called ThroughPuter has a message for the world’s cloud computing providers: Come talk to us, we can make your cloud fly for serious applications. The company, which recently presented at our Structure Launchpad competition, has built a hardware architecture and operating system designed from ground up to run parallel-processing applications in a multi-tenant environment. Now, all it needs is a distribution channel.
Mark Sandstrom, founder and CEO of ThroughPuter, explained the company’s vision to me as solving a fundamental problem in today’s IT’s world. While more applications are expected to both run faster and run in the cloud, the cloud computing infrastructure underlying those apps isn’t up to the challenge. As Moore’s Law slows down, multicore chips are replacing faster clock speeds, but, Sandstrom said, neither new chips nor the clouds running them were really designed to execute parallel processing workloads…