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Thoughts and Topics Around Cloud Backup and Recovery

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Posts Tagged ‘Amazon EC2’

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AT&T squares up to Amazon EC2

Posted by brennels on November 17, 2009

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.”

Read the full article here on searchcloudcomputing.com

Posted in Amazon, AT&T, Cloud Computing, Cloud Providers | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Amazon lowers EC2 cloud service fees, adds MySQL relational instancing

Posted by brennels on October 28, 2009

By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published October 27, 2009, 6:07 PM

“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.”amazon web services logo

“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.”

 

Posted in Amazon, Cloud Computing, Cloud Providers | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Replication and cloud computing are inseparable

Posted by brennels on June 30, 2009

 I finally got around to catching up on some of my e-mails and noticed this article on www.Infostor.com from Eric Burgener, a senior analyst and consultant with the Taneja Group research and consulting firm. You can read the full article here but it provides some interesting perspectives on using replication technology for cloud backup and recovery.

“Cloud-based computing is an emerging practice that offers significantly more infrastructure and financial flexibility than traditional computing models. At the heart of cloud-based computing are utility “services” backed by a loosely coupled infrastructure that is self-healing, geographically dispersed, designed for user self-service, and instantaneously scalable in response to the ebb and flow of business demands. These services are easily accessible across IP-based networks, making it very easy to take advantage of them, and all infrastructure management issues are off-loaded to the cloud provider. Cloud providers today offer everything from access to raw compute or storage capacity resources to full-blown application services in areas such as payroll and customer relationship management (CRM).

The cloud enables a new set of solutions to solve perennial storage problems much more cost-effectively. Data protection stands to benefit significantly from cloud-based computing, in particular because cloud computing can provide the foundation for easily accessible, affordable disaster recovery (DR) solutions. This easy access facilitates rapid implementation of off-site protection for new projects at larger enterprises, and can enable DR solutions that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) could not afford in the past. Given the increasing criticality of data, all enterprises should have a DR plan in place for at least key applications. But many do not, primarily due to cost and complexity issues. Cloud-based infrastructure provides an interesting DR alternative that addresses both of these issues.”

Read the rest of the article on http://www.infostor.com/index/articles/display/1702441640/s-articles/s-infostor/s-volume-13/s-Issue_6/s-Feature/s-Replication_and_cloud_computing_are_inseparable.html.com

Posted in Amazon, Business Continuity, Cloud Availability, Server Recovery | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Amazon is Working to Secure its Xen-Based Infrastructure Cloud

Posted by brennels on June 12, 2009

by Alessandro Perilli   |   Thursday, June 11, 2009   |   0 Comments

It doesn’t matter if we are talking about SaaS, PaaS or IaaS architectures. Customers have many reasons to not trust the cloud computing solutions that the market offers today and one of them is the lack of security.

Amazon has the oldest, most popular and very likely the largest cloud infrastructure existing today, and thus it must under continuous fire when enterprise customers evaluate its Xen-based Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2).

The company recently announced a series of initiatives to make EC2, S3 and the other Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities more secure, and to clarify the level of security currently in place:

Read the rest of the article on virtualization.info

Posted in Amazon, Security | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Backup and Recovery Strategies for the Cloud

Posted by brennels on June 8, 2009

Last week I spoke with Christian Perry, a reporter for Processor Magazine, regarding backup and recovery trends and processes. Some of the questions being asked were focused around how to identify  which data is critical for backing up which got me thinking. Why decide and spend countless hours doing a data analysis to determine which data is critcal to each department. Why not select it all? The best solution is not having to decide and just back up the entire server workload. Data isn’t the most critical component of the server workload anymore, just as important and often overlooked is the operating system, applications and configuration settings of the server in addition to the associated data. Attempting to prioritize and determine the value of each file folder is not an easy process and IT managers are now looking to “set and forget” workload backup solutions that capture all changes to a server workload and allow them to determine at recovery time what is important. It is better to have and not need then wish you had and don’t in these scenarios.

Then I started thinking what about those organizations that don’t have a disaster recovery facility to backup and archive too or those who can’t afford the hosting services to provide this type of facility.

CloudBerry for Amazon S3Then I remembered an application that I was recently asked to test and write about called CloudBerry from cloudberrylab which is a consumer based backup application that allows you to create space on the Amazon S3 file share.  CloudBerry Explorer application is a freeware that makes managing Amazon S3 storage easier for online backup. The product itself was pretty intuitive and not difficult to set up but noticed the transfer time I noticed was longer than I expected which was likely due to my internet connection.

The CloudBerry application is in addition to the growing trend of online cloud backup products similar to Mozy, Carbonite and Zmanda. But many of the challenges for consumer based backup remain the same as more enterprise cloud backup and recovery products having to select which data is critical, calculating transfer rates and the ability to recover and restore the data appropriately.

After looking around many of the enterprise backup products on the market provide the ability to select which data you want to protect but it seems to me that it would be easier to not have to select and just protect the entire server or workstation so if you needed to recover just the OS, data or associated application you had the choice available as well as the entire workload.

Then I noticed via Twitter that Double-Take software released a full server cloud backup and recovery application note for Amazon EC2 cloud infrastructure.  For Double-Take this makes perfect sense as it seems that rather than configuring a VPN connection to a disaster recovery data center you just set it up to backup and run the full server workload in the Amazon EC2 infrastructure and recover when needed.

It will be interesting to see the progress and adoption of cloud backup and recovery strategies moving forward. The link to the Double-Take application note is below. You have to give up your contact information but this is the first time I have seen a company actually release a detailed step by step instructions for cloud backup and recovery.

Guidelines for Implementing Double-Take® Cloud Recovery using Amazon Web Services

Posted in Amazon, Cloud Availability, Cloud Providers, Server Recovery | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Op/Ed: Amazon Delivers Infrastructure

Posted by brennels on May 22, 2009

The Amazon — the river, that is — is both impressive in scale and among the most diverse ecosystems on the planet. It’s both fertile ground for innovation and a nexus back to which much of the earth’s evolution can be traced. In the world of science, its significance is vast.

 

Similarly, its namesake in Seattle — the erstwhile bookseller — has remarkably and unexpectedly emerged as a veritable Amazon to the world of computing. Its public cloud offering — Amazon EC2 — is challenging a lot of thinking these days. In the world of IT, its significance is vast.

 

What’s most remarkable about Amazon isn’t that it appeared out of nowhere as an infrastructure vendor. What’s most remarkable is that it has done so with impressive competence and grace.

EC2 is a juggernaut, and it seems to get better with each turn.

Read the rest of the article here

Posted in Amazon, Cloud Providers | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Amazon Enhances Cloud Scalability, Management of EC2

Posted by brennels on May 19, 2009

Amazon Web Services is rolling out several new features for its Elastic Compute Cloud that aims to make it easier for businesses to scale the cloud computing resources they need, and to manage their traffic coming into their instances in EC2. Amazon officials said customers were asking for greater control monitoring, scaling and directing traffic in the cloud computing platform.

Amazon Web Services is launching a number of new features for its cloud computing environment designed to make it easier for customers to manage their use of the compute resources.

The features announced May 18 range from new abilities for scaling the compute resources on Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) to balancing the workloads across those resources.

The new offerings will give EC2 users greater control over the cloud computing resources, which will help them increase performance and lower costs, said Peter DeSantis, general manager of Amazon EC2.

Read the rest of article here

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