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Category: storage

  • Flashy Debut for Private Cloud Storage Startup Coho Data

    Coho Data, a Calif.-based startup has emerged with a new software-defined storage platform that combines Intel PCIe flash cards, commodity hardware and Amazon EC2-inspired cloud technology. According to the company, the result is a cost effective storage architecture that beats all flash arrays.

    Coho Data CTO Andy Warfield indicated that the company has a deep familiarity with computing efficiency and scale as well as getting value from commodity hardware. This experience has led to the new Coho DataStream product line that consists of a storage stack anchored by Coho Data’s 1000 MicroArray DataStream.

    The Coho MicroArray operates under an 80/20 read/write workload and can reach up to 90,000 IOPS. This allows each 2U DataStream Chassis to provide 180,000 IOPS. Coho Data’s extensible Data Profiles provides multi-tenant, multi-protocol and applications direct access to the data stored on the platform.

    Coho Data CEO Ramana Jonnala said that the company has taken the best ideas from public cloud-based architectures by designing the storage stack. He added that the Coho Data’s DataStream platform leverages from sophisticated software to make use of flash for all the applications.

    Jonnala asserted that data should be on a storage architecture that meets the performance and scalability or today’s cloud generation company’s needs whether they are private or public. Before duplication ad compression, the pricing is set at $2.50 per GB for a 40 TB DataStream chassis. It is expected that Coho DataStream will be shipped latter this year.

  • Private Cloud for the Videogame Empire Built By Disney


    Cloud computing has significantly eased hosting and running of applications. Now developers can house their applications thanks to Joe Arnold, the chief technology officer at Engine Yard. Over the past decade, he has witnessed a shift towards building software that runs across numerous severs. He asserts that now developers are using completely different storage spaces.

    Engine Yard plunged into the cloud storage service through Amazon when it launched Simple Storage System, which is also known as S3. The S3 provides more speed and scalability through stripping away of traditional storage characteristics such as style of organization and hierarchical file folder. It is now a great and highly popular way of storing static content such as images and videos.

    Disney interactive is the latest addition to cloud computing. The web properties and video game division revealed that it had built a private cloud. This cloud is made through open source technologies such as swift. Disney is not making use of the entire OpenStack in its cloud. It is making use of CloudStack – an open source Amazon alternative.

  • Online Storage Firm Sets Its Sights beyond the Cloud


    Egnyte, an online storage company, has formulated plans to beef up its security as it seeks to position itself as a cloud player that can ease privacy anxieties attributed to the US government’s online surveillance program.

    The Mountain View Company, which prides itself from raising $33 million from venture capitalists such as Kleiner Perkins and Google ventures, is set to announce five additions to its advisory board on Wednesday. It is taping the tech executives from marketing giant Y&R, biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, security firm Sophos and elsewhere.

    Egnyte provides cloud storage as well as collaboration tools for businesses and competes with firms such as SugarSync,  and DropBox.

    Late last month, Egnyte announced a new product dubbed Storage Connect that will allow businesses to access data on different levels of sensitivity and in various physical locations through one user interface.

    The company is also set to unveil its prism prevention program on the same day that will allow businesses to detect when their employees make use of insecure file sharing programs that could enlist government monitoring.

    Vineet Jain, the chief executive officer of Egnyte has intimated that cloud is overhyped and many corporations will certainly relocate some of their data from behind the corporate firewalls into remote servers.

    Most companies deal with data dichotomy by setting up and managing different systems for different types of information through different vendors. However, Egnyte that was formed in 2007 has developed an on-premise storage service as well as a hybrid cloud.

  • Nirvanix, IBM Cloud Storage Partner Files for Bankruptcy


    Nirvanix, IBM’s SmartCloud storage service from San Diego last month told customers and partners that it will be shutting down on 30th September. The customers were given just 2 weeks to migrate their data and now the company is filing for bankruptcy.

    The company released this information on a post on its website that revealed chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. Nirvanix gave its customers a further 2 weeks to remove their data from its service. The new deadline for data removal is 15th October.

    The website post indicates that Nirvanix sought to file a voluntary chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in order to maximize value for its creditors and search for alternatives to provide the best possible transition for its customers.

    The initial indication of Nirvanix bankruptcy came as a surprise to many people. The company was formed in 2007 and had partnerships with Dell and IBM. The company was lauded for its superb funding and technical prowess.

    The bankruptcy issue was first reported on the wall street journal and this week’s announcement provides some sort of closure for people who have a keen interest on the company. Nirvanix has specifically mentioned Google storage, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure and IBM SoftLayer as possible replacements.

    The bankruptcy paperwork indicates that Dell marketing L.P, formerly known as storage outfit EqualLogic is Nirvanix’s largest creditor. Other creditors include Gartner, Nimsoft and Salesforce.com.

  • Chinese Cloud Service Provider Kanbox Purchased by Alibaba


    E-commerce titan Alibaba has fully purchased Kanbox, which is a leading cloud storage provider in China, for an undisclosed sum.

    Reports reveal that Alibaba stated that Kanbox users are now able to integrate their accounts on Alibaba related services.

    Kanbox has been having a healthy growth since it was launched in 2010. It has accumulated over 15 million users, with 3 million of those accessing it from mobile. The company is also offering special accounts for Taobao sellers.

    The acquisition comes at a time when Alibaba is continuing to cement its position in both mobile and cloud storage services and also venturing into web services that are consumer oriented, especially smartphones.

    Alibaba released Aliyun OS that was developed using JavaScript and HTML5 in 2011. This project was not successful after Alibaba got a run in with Google after reports that it has developed an OS that is incompatible with android. This halted the upcoming launch of Acer device and the Aliyun OS did not get a large phone maker partnership. The stand alone Aliyun cloud storage is now used by businesses as opposed to average consumers.

    After the acquisition, Alibaba and Kanbox are offering 10TB of free storage. The impact of Kanbox’s acquisition on Alibaba’s Aliyun project is not yet clear. However, the purchase confirms Alibaba’s push to integrate cloud storage infrastructure into its services.

  • RightScale to Control Virtual Networks after Expansion Drive


    RightScale is a gateway tool that allows users to use a single console to spin up storage and computing resources from multiple providers. The company has announced that it is planning to integrate an advanced networking control feature.

    Carl Brooks of the 451 Research Group indicated that the network manager is a natural advancement of the company’s product strategy. It can also be termed as a significant advancement in easing the process of creating cloud computing features. He indicated that network configuration needs an automation since it has been a largely hand driven process.

    Brooks indicated that networking is extremely hard compared to virtual machines that can be scaled up or down, stopped or paused. Many providers give public or private IPs to customers and a VPN tunnel. However, the process of deployment and management varies from one provider to the other. Some providers make use of APIs while others need a manual setup. Brooks indicated that a system that can sit between this complexity and the customers is very much welcomed.

    RightScale says that the network manager will provide an abstraction of network constructs across the clouds. It will provide a common user interface to access the different resources for Amazon, Google, Microsoft and CloudStack.

    RightScale has indicated that the initial release will be for Amazon web servers, which has the largest market share in cloud provision. The company is hoping to add the network manager in other providers.

  • Amazon Upgrades its Virtual Private Cloud Technology with IP Configurability


    Amazon Web Services has extended IP configurability across its virtual private cloud technology hence giving developers more control over how they configure IP addresses for rented virtual machines within the cloud.

    Announced last week on Wednesday, this advance means that admins now have greater IP allocation options in the premier cloud technology. They can choose whether to allocate public IP addresses to rented virtual machines when instances are deployed in their default Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) subnet or not. It also means they are allowed to give instances in non-default subnets public IPs preceding launch.

    Amazon's Management Console supports this public IP feature, so GUI aficionados will be granted access to the features during the instance creation wizard via tickboxes.

    The capabilities of these changes bring with them potential uses in isolation of apps from each other through separate subnet placement, for example, and allocation of a separate public IP to each in order to feed out separately to the Internet.

    With all VM instances functioning within a VPC, developers are getting a more controllable network substrate and – theoretically – an easier-to-handle security model. The changes come as the company is in the process of elevating VPC to the default AWS environment. This makes the default operating environment for every new elastic compute (EC2) instance a private network.

  • VMware Embraces Cyborg Cloud by Adding Cloud Foundry to its vCHS


    A while ago VMware made news by tossing out its open source platform as-a-service cloud initiative into a spin-off dubbed Pivotal. This was alongside other tech products like Spring, Greenplum Database, and GemFire.

    In an announcement at VMworld, San Francisco, on Monday, the virtualization company revealed that among the key components it would be tapping into for its upcoming cloud is Pivotal's Cloud Foundry. The company announced that VMware's upcoming vCloud Hybrid Service cloud will come with the platform as-a-service wired atop it.

    For VMware customers, this means they will now be capable of creating their own cyborg clouds whose underlay is the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) and overlay is a Pivotal CF. Pivotal CF is designed to work with both vCHS and vSphere, and it will deliver access for customers to an enterprise support contract.

    Support for Cloud Foundry is set to become available in the fourth quarter of 2013.

  • New Zealand Cloud Storage Node Opened By Mega

    Mega cloud storage service announced via its blog that it has opened a New Zealand storage node. This will serve customers in Australia, Fiji and Papua New Guinea.

    This node comes seven months after the launch of Mega by former Megaload founder, Kim Dotcom. The launch saw 500,000 signups within the first 14 hours. 

    The company indicated that the transfer of files to and from an account will originate or terminate in the New Zealand node. However, API requests as well as storage of metadata will still be done from Europe.

    Mega also indicated that its geographical data redundancy policy will still apply to the new node. This means that all the data on the New Zealand cluster will still be mirrored to the European site. This is because New Zealand customers are legally barred from offshore storage of sensitive data.

    Mega has significantly updated its C++ SDK to enable it to work on the broader platform support. This is according to customer feedback.

    Mega however noted that there are security challenges in relation to the use of computers in general and specifically regarding the use of JavaScript-based cryptography.

  • Microsoft and Google hot on the Heels of Amazon in the Cloud

    Amazon's success in cloud computing is the cause of much woes for its competitors Microsoft and Google. In an attempt to catch up with Amazon, whose web services are currently the leader in the cloud computing service sector, Microsoft and Google have decided to upgrade their services with new features. These upgrades are also expected to heat up the competition between them.

    According to a NetworkWorld report, this week Google upgraded its public cloud service by launching load-balancing features. The service usually aims at enabling customers to scale up and down virtual machines and hence accommodate any demand spikes experienced. As for Microsoft, just a few months ago it improved its Azure cloud service with new auto-scaling feature, and thanks to these features users can now scale up and down resources in the cloud.

    Brandon Butler of NetworkWorld has been reported stating that the two companies are already playing catch-up with Amazon Web Services, which is the leading IaaS provider and already offers such services.

    In the meantime, Microsoft has raised its stakes in the battle against Google through a new advertisement in which Microsoft consumers are warned "not to gamble with Google Docs." This move is geared towards earning the company public favor in the cloud space.