Tag: amazon-s3

  • Amazon Steps up the Pressure with More Storage Price Cuts

    In a move that has left many of their competitors stranded, Amazon has announced that it will reduce the prices for two of its most popular storage products. The announcement that was made by the public cloud leader through a blog post will take effect from February and will affect the S3 storing of files service and the Elastic Block Store that holds information from databases. These price drops might seem too little but is actually substantial.  The customers who store more than 5000 TB on S3 a month will receive a 22 percent decrease, which is a reduction in cost per gigabyte from 5.5 cents to 4.3 cents.

    Two new slices of physical servers that are able to handle computing workloads were also announced. These options are m3.large and m3.medium.They are good not only for legacy applications and databases, but they also have many other uses. The good thing about these instances is that they can be used on any applications not those that require heavy duty graphics or memory resources.

    This drop makes it the 40th price drop by the company. The lowering of prices and launching of new features is a strategy Amazon frequently uses. This is because many companies choose it, thus they are able to buy the products in bulk and later customize it to suit the customers’ needs. The reduction of price mostly helps to make the company more attractive to  the customers .Other companies like Rackspace, Microsoft and Google also try to play the price reduction card  but  Amazon always tops them by coming up with new things that pose a great challenge to the competition. With this latest reduction, Amazon has made things worse for the other companies.

  • CloudBerry Backup Lets Users Back up Windows Home Server to Amazon S3

    CloudBerry Lab has released CloudBerry Backup version 1.3 – an application that allows users to backup their data online to their Amazon S3 accounts.

    CloudBerry Backup is also available as a Windows Home Server add-on. It integrates with the WHS console and offers scheduled backup to cloud storage, hosted on Amazon S3.

    According to the company’s announcement, newer version features full support for Windows Home Server Drive Extender that lets users seamlessly increase disk storage by adding new drives. These do not appear as new drive letters, but simply increase the available space.

    Backup Window is a new feature of the scheduler that help specify for how long backup job should run so that it for example only runs during the night time while not impacting users computer performance and network bandwidth in the day time.

    Besides, there is an improved support for the operations involving Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service.

    CloudBerry Backup works on Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7. Command line interface allows partners and advanced computer users integrate backup and restore plans with other routines.

    A single-user license for CloudBerry S3 Backup 1.3 for Windows costs $29.99. It will be offered without charge to students, educational institutions and non-profit organizations.

    CloudBerry Lab was established in 2008 by a group of IT professionals with the mission to help organizations in adopting Cloud computing technologies “by closing the gap between Cloud vendor propositions and consumer needs through development of innovative low-costs solutions.”