Tag Archives: Amazon Web Services

Computers

Gartner's top 10 cloud storage providers

Leave a comment

According to a Gartner survey, about 19 percent of organizations are using the cloud for production computing, while 20 percent are using public cloud storage services.

That means there’s a pretty good sized market for the cloud, and specifically cloud storage. Gartner predicted in 2012 $109 billion was spent on cloud computing, a 20 percent increase from the year before.

But the cloud is a big industry too, with a lot of vendors seemingly having a cloud strategy today. So where do potential customers start? Recently, Gartner released a list of the top 10 cloud storage providers, based on enterprise capabilities. Below is a description of each, based on pros, cons, strengths and weaknesses.

Amazon Web Services

Like many other aspects of cloud computing, Amazon Web Services is considered a market leader in cloud storage. It’s been an early and aggressive player in the market and its services drive offerings from competitors, Gartner says, while its pricing is the “industry reference point.” Its Simple Storage Service (S3) is the basic object storage, while Elastic Block Storage is for storage volumes. AWS keeps innovating too. Earlier this year AWS announced Glacier, a long-term, low-cost archival storage services. More recently, at its first-ever user conference, AWS announced Redshift, a cloud-based data warehousing service.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld

Computers

Amazon Web Services accommodates big data storage

Leave a comment

Eyeing the growing market for big data analysis, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has introduced a storage package, called High Storage, that can offer fast access to large amounts of data.

High Storage, an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) package, is designed to run data intensive analysis jobs, such as seismic analysis, log processing and data warehousing, according to the company. It is built on a parallel file system architecture that allows data to be moved on and off multiple disks at once, speeding throughput times.

“Instances of this family provide proportionally higher storage density per instance, and are ideally suited for applications that benefit from high sequential I/O performance across very large data sets,” AWS states in the online marketing literature for this service. The company is pitching the service as a complement to its Elastic MapReduce service, which provides a platform for Hadoop big data analysis. AWS itself is using the High Storage instances to power its Redshift data warehouse service.

An AWS instance is a bundle of compute units, memory, storage and other services configured to the characteristics of a particular type of workload. High Storage is the ninth type of compute instance that AWS has introduced. It joins other instant types customized for particular workloads, such as instances optimized for using GPUs (graphics processing units) or for HPC (high performance computing) jobs.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Source: PCWorld

Computers

16 of the most useful cloud management tools

Leave a comment

One of the biggest concerns users have with public cloud resources is not knowing how much they will cost, given the pay-as-you-go model.

“IT shops are becoming cost centers for service delivery,” says William Fellows, a researcher at the 451 Group. “But they’re looking for ways to determine how their clouds are running, how much it’s costing and whether it’s a good value.”

Vendors provide some services around tracking usage. Amazon Web Services, for example, last week announced more granular data, allowing users to track their services hour by hour.

But there is a growing ecosystem of cloud management tools. Some help companies manage, track and optimize their use of public or private cloud resources. Others help companies automate and deploy cloud resources. And others act as a platform for managing public cloud resources.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Source: PCWorld

Computers

Amazon makes it easier to track costs, usage in its cloud

Leave a comment

Somewhat undercutting a budding ecosystem of vendors that provide similar services, Amazon Web Services today announced increased features for customers to track their usage of AWS public cloud resources.

Detailed billing features include the ability to break down usage costs by the hour and type of instance that is used. Customers now have the ability to view costs by the specific product used, from reserved instances to on-demand and the free usage tier. “We’ve had a number of requests for better access to more detailed billing data,” AWS evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post on the company’s site today.

Services to help track costs and usage in AWS‘s cloud have been seen by somewhat lacking from AWS, which has led to a growing market of third-party tools. These range from being able to help users monitor usage and costs but they also help optimize the use of AWS‘s cloud by determining the best size of virtual machine instance that is needed based on the workload.

The addition of more detailed billing features announced today adds to AWS‘s current tools, such as CloudWatch, which allows users to estimate their monthly bill based on usage to-date, programmatically access that information and consolidate billing from multiple accounts into a single payment system.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Source: PCWorld

Computers

Amazon Web Services continues Windows push with PowerShell addition

Leave a comment

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added PowerShell to the management options for its cloud, in a move that reaches out to the Windows community.

Part of Amazon’s Microsoft push is to let developers and administrators manage their AWS services in a way that’s natural to them, according to the company.

AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell provide over 550 so-called cmdlets for allowing administrators to make service calls or create scripts for automating cloud management, all from within the command line-based PowerShell environment. A cmdlet is a lightweight command that is used in PowerShell.

Twenty services from Amazon can be managed using Tools for Windows PowerShell, including Relational Database Service, Simple Storage Service (S3), Virtual Private Cloud and of course EC2 itself.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Source: PCWorld