Amazon Web Services to make free cloud offer
"With the new free AWS [Amazon Web Services] usage tier, developers will be able to launch applications at no cost. If their new application spikes in popularity, it will seamlessly scale and run on AWS’s inexpensive, pay-as-you-go, standard pricing," the company said in a statement.
The single instance that will be used to run the applications will be a Linux Micro Instance. This is a low-powered 32 or 64-bit virtual machine with 613MB of memory, up to two EC2 Compute Units (ECUs) — which function as virtual processors — and Elastic Block Storage (EBS) storage only. An ECU provides the equivalent processor capacity of a 1-1.2GHz Opteron or Xeon processor.
Data quality practices ‘should evolve over time’
Businesses should be looking to update their data quality practices over time to as their organisation continues to evolve, it has been suggested.
SmartData Collective blogger Jim Harris explained that companies often employ best practices when first starting data quality initiatives, but many fail to build on these standards.
He added that ensuring data quality requires continual work on the part of a company’s employees.
Cloud Computing to Fuel Security Market, Forrester Says
A new report from Forrester Research projects that the cloud security market will grow to $1.5 billion by 2015—a shift that will disrupt what Forrester calls the "security solution ecosystem."
In a report entitled "Security and the Cloud," Forrester analyst Jonathan Penn predicted that rather than reallocating portions of existing security budgets to cloud computing, organizations will allocate money to security within cloud projects—creating "a whole new category of revenue for the security market."
Dark Clouds on the Virtual Horizon
Virtualization continues to play the good-cop/bad-cop game in the enterprise, offering both tremendous promise, but with significant challenges on the road to a more efficient and effective data ecosystem. At the same time, however, the hiccups in virtual deployment are hampering that other significant IT development: cloud computing.
OpenStack Delivers First Release of Cloud Computing Tech
After only three short months of life, the OpenStack open source cloud computing initiative is out with its first public release of production quality code.
The first OpenStack release is codenamed Austin and includes both storage and cloud compute fabric technologies that can be used by enterprises to deliver cloud services. Originally an effort kick-started by NASA and Rackspace, OpenStack is now benefiting from the support and contributions of more than 35 technology vendors.
News from the future
I was floored today when the director of BGI told me they would soon reach a sequencing rate of 1000 (human) genomes per day (so, 10^5 to 10^6 genomes per year is right on the horizon). According to him, they can be profitable at a price of $5k per genome! [Clarification: I later learned this might mean at 10x coverage … not exactly sure, although I tried to get a more precise statement.]
Crowdsourcing work: Labour on demand or digital sweatshop?
There are not many chief executives who can boast a workforce of half a million people around the globe.
But then Lukas Biewald’s workforce is not your traditional one.
As boss of San Francisco-based CrowdFlower, he says that his company offers "labour on demand".
His employees are crowdsourced – people who work from home, when needed, on specific projects.
"It doesn’t make sense to build a box around people, put in internet and plumbing and everything else, make them drive to work and have managers for them," Mr Biewald says.
OpenStack to Be Production-Ready by January
Deduplication solutions ‘should be taken up by more companies’
A large number of companies could benefit from using deduplication solutions at their businesses.
This is according to Data Storage Connection columnist Charles Butler, who explained that many organisations are reporting rapid data growth of a more complex and dispersed nature than previously seen.
He said that deduplication solutions can play a part in tackling this problem, by dramatically reducing bandwidth and storage requirements, as well as centralising backup data to make disaster recovery planning easier to manage.