Bad news for GoGrid customers as today we received the following breach notification by email… Dear Valued Customer: In the normal process of reviewing our system activity, our Security Team discovered that an unauthorized third party may have viewed your account information, including payment card data. We immediately took action to protect our custom […]
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Note: ESJ’s editors carefully choose vendor-issued press releases about new or upgraded products and services. We have edited and/or condensed this release to highlight key features but make no claims as to the accuracy of the vendor’s statements.
Double-Take Software has leveraged Amazon Web Services to create a real-time workload recovery platform, Double-Take Cloud, to protect businesses from disaster and keep companies up and running without any upfront costs. Double-Take Cloud leverages the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
Traditional disaster recovery solutions are often reserved for those companies that can afford to build and manage a second data center, complete with back-up servers standing by in case of a disaster or outage — a costly practice that requires significant resources. Other IT departments rely solely on the capabilities of local tape backup, also a time-consuming process with limited recovery capabilities.
Double-Take Software today announced the release of Double-Take Cloud which provides full server protection, failover and recovery using Amazon Ec2 Web Services infrastructure. According to Peter Laudenslager, Double-Take Cloud project leader, this is the only solution that allows businesses to replicate entire server workloads, including the operating system, applications and associated data in real-time and failover to the Amazon Ec2 infrastructure in the event of a failure.
Peter went on to differentiate the Double-Take Cloud solution from others who claim they backup to a cloud computing infrastructure. “With the Double-Take Cloud solution, a customer can recover a failed server into the cloud in less time that it would take a traditional vaulting company to deliver a tape. This isn’t like all the on-line backup offerings that seem to be sprouting up; this isn’t some scaled-up, laptop oriented, file-copy application rebranded as “cloud”. This is best-in-class, real-time replication and full system state recovery. It’s an industrial grade solution capable of protecting Exchange, MS-SQL, and Windows Domain Controllers – in fact, it will protect just about any Windows application or file server, and recover it perfectly, in the cloud.“
This is an interesting challenge to the market that could subvert the traditional backup paradigm as there are many companies that claim they provide solutions to backup and recovery full server workloads what they don’t tell you is they haven’t solved the original problem of being able to recover rapidly to dissimilar hardware. So, there may be a backup copy of the server somewhere accessible from the internet but the chances are it isn’t any easier to use than if it was sitting on a tape that needed to be recovered.
Peter Laudenslager from Double-Take Software went on to say: “In the past, businesses had to choose between investing in the equipment, facilities, and expertise to quickly recover critical business systems from a failure, or not investing, and having little or no ability to recover. Double-Take Cloud is simple enough and inexpensive enough that every business can have a great recovery solution. Now, for a monthly fee, they can get all the hardware, software, and infrastructure they need to get real-time data protection and rapid system recovery, in the cloud.“
This is a relatively new model for Double-Take Software as they will be providing the ability to purchase Double-Take Cloud licenses online at https://buy.doubletake.com/cloud for a low monthly fee in a pay-as-you-go service. There are then the Amazon storage fees that would be in addition but according to the Amazon pricing structure for the EC2 this could be as little as a few cents for every gigabyte of data stored.
The Double-Take Cloud release could be a challenge to some storage providers offering propietary storage solutions that realistically don’t reduce the recovery time objective any more than traditional tape recovery solutions. It will be interesting to see if storage vendors and or other cloud providers will open up new opportunities for Double-Take Software to provide the real-time replication and full server recovery capabilities they are missing in order to increase their adoption in the cloud computing marketing.
OK I’m back from the holidays and just recently presented a webinar on how to protect entire virtual infrastructure in the cloud and the risks of having your entire datacenter residing on a few virtual servers. Unlike the old days if a server went down the only impact was what ever the application that was running on that server. Now with consolidated virtualized infrastructure if a physical server goes down there could be a dozen virtual machines go offline simultaneously. I believe Amazon still met the SLA but this article should serve as good information for anyone looking to implement a 100% virtualized environement without some sort of loal failover capabilities.
Ruby on Rails Platform as a Service startup Heroku started off the new year with a nasty surprise. Without warning on January 2, all of the specialized, high-capacity Amazon EC2 instances that run its popular application and development service disappeared in the blink of an eye. Twenty-two virtual machines, approximately $20,000 per month in hosting fees for high-memory m2.2xlarge instances, suddenly vanished, leaving Heroku’s estimated 44,000 running applications in the lurch.
Amazon blamed a routing device in its Virginia data center, and the service was back up in an hour. But Oren Teich, Heroku’s product developer, said this is one of the many important lessons new ventures and businesses need to learn before they decide to work entirely in the cloud. Traditional contingency planning doesn’t go far enough, he said: expect the unexpected.
“Amazon Web Services has attributed a 44-minute outage in part of its Northern Virginia data center last week to the failure of power supply in one “availability zone” in the data center, which was soon followed by a second failure of a component in the redundant system.
Users of the Amazon EC2 cloud with workloads in Amazon’s Northern Virginia data center experienced problems early in the morning of December 9, with some operations in a part of the data center interrupted during a five-hour period.
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Amazon started notifying customers of a problem at 4:08 a.m. Eastern. By 9:41 a.m., it’s Amazon Service Health Dashboard reported that “we have completed recovery of most instances affected by this event.”
The postings first mentioned a connectivity issue, then acknowledged a power issue. In following up on the postings, InformationWeek asked Amazon whether the power issue was inside the data center or an issue with an external supplier.”
By Carl Brooks, Technology Writer
09 Dec 2009 | SearchCloudComputing.com
“Amazon Web Services (AWS) had a power failure at its flagship data center in the wee hours of the morning today, suffering from connectivity issues from about 4AM to 10AM Eastern Standard Time.
The cloud computing giant reported an “underlying power issue” that affected some instances in its US-EAST-1 availability zone. Amazon has four availability zones in the U.S., two on the East Coast and two on the West Coast.
The outage was irksome to users, but many gave Amazon points for better disclosure and fast response on the issue. Independent cloud monitoring services accurately reported the issue, a sign that public cloud services are gaining more traction.”
This is a great article and just demonstrates the leadership of Amazon and their thinking. Absolutely Amazon EC2 will be utilized as a cloud recovery platform and already is today. Utilizing the Amazon EC2 infrastructure is a great cost alternative to small, medium as well as large enterprise data centers to building dedicated disaster recovery co-location data centers. It is even more cost effective than engaging in offsite tape hosting services. Read the rest of the article written by ZDNet below and would love to hear your thoughts on how Cloud Computing will continue to evolve as the preferred disaster recovery platform in 2010.
“Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said Tuesday that enterprises are increasingly using Amazon Web Services for disaster recovery.
Vogels, speaking at the Supernova conference in San Francisco (follow on Twitter), made the remarks during a cloud computing 101 talk.
While Vogels covered a lot of well covered ground—at least for folks that cover cloud computing regularly—his disaster recovery statement stuck out from an IT management perspective.
“Enterprises are writing enormous checks to disaster recovery companies,” said Vogels.
It’s a point well taken. Disaster recovery is a huge business that really took off after the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. If Amazon Web Services becomes a viable disaster recovery option it could be very disruptive.”
Read the full ZDNet Article here and see a related video of Werner Volgels speaking about Amazon and the Cloud
By Jo Maitland
16 Nov 2009 | SearchCloudComputing.com
“Amazon might have stolen the lead on the cloud computing market, but AT&T plans to give the online retail giant a run for its money.
This week AT&T will launch Synaptic Compute, a service that allows users to rent servers on demand in a pay-as-you-go way, with no up-front fee or termination charges. It’s a shot across the bow to EC2, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud service, but is the telco serious?
The Compute as a Service offering is part of AT&T’s managed hosting business, which is shifting toward a more cloudlike model of flexible provisioning and billing as compared with its traditional, fully managed hosting services. AT&T launched Synaptic Storage in August, an on-demand storage service.”
“Come November 1, Amazon’s Web Services division will be lowering the per-hour prices for all of its current five instance types (AMIs), while adding two new AMI types on the high-end, according to a multitude of announcements from Amazon today. At the new high end of the scale will be a “quadruple extra-large” AMI with 68.4 GB of dedicated RAM, and the virtual computing power of a 1 GHz, 26-core Intel Xeon processor (albeit a 2007 model).”
“The new high-end instances won’t come cheap — they’ll carry a premium of $2.40 per instance-hour for Linux editions, and $2.88 per instance-hour for Windows Server 2003. The previous high-end AMI, still called “extra large,” had been priced at nearly one-third that amount.”
“However, revenue from the new super-high-end will help drive down prices for everyone else, starting November 1. At that time, the per-hour price for the smallest and cheapest instance available, running generic Linux, will be reduced by 15% to $0.085 per hour. Windows Server instances will be trimmed a bit, but not by as much percentage-wise — the “extra large” price, for instance, will drop only 4¢ to $0.96 per hour.”
“Amazon would like to remind you to thank them for the heightened expectations.
So a Web app running on a telecom service goes belly up and cloud is moribund yet again. That seems to be the latest version of the slightly overheated cloud marketing machine this week.
It may be that the end user cannot tell Amazon Web Services apart from Gmail, which isn’t his job, really, or that the Sidekick/Danger/Microsoft data loss may be one of the most spectacular IT bungles ever made, but this is certainly not going to register in the real cloud computing markets.
No-one stores their email contacts on AWS. Salesforce.com isn’t ever going to let this happen (call me if they do, just sayin’) and Azure, well, isn’t exactly a thing yet, and had zero contact with the destroyed data. I would venture that not a single consumer of any of these services even blinked when they heard about the Sidekick apocalypse.”
Amazon has introduced a Virtual Provate Cloud which is a new offer to it existing AWS.
“Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) lets you create your own logically isolated set of Amazon EC2 instances and connect it to your existing network using an IPsec VPN connection. This new offering lets you take advantage of the low cost and flexibility of AWS while leveraging the investment you have already made in your IT infrastructure.”
The VPC release can be read here and provides steps for data center managers to create their own VPC
It will be interesting to see the progress and adoption of cloud backup and recovery strategies moving forward. One of the new trends for 2010 will be utilizing the Amazon AWS as a backup data center to provide a low cost option to shipping and storing tape. With the recent release of the Double-Take Software Cloud Recovery application note it appears that all the pieces are in place to make cloud recovery a viable option for backup and recovery.
