s3

Explore your Amazon S3 account

For users of Amazon's S3 service, freeware CloudBerry Explorer is an excellent utility that connects you with your account and makes managing your online file storage as easy as dragging and dropping.

The interface is set up in FTP-style, with a split screen allowing file navigation on your computer and in your S3 account. Modeled as breadcrumbs and not absolute file locations, users can quickly jump between subfolders and their parent directories. A pane on the bottom shows the file transfer progress, but there's a stand-out feature that makes this a serious tool for S3 obsessives. The source … Read more

Podcast: Zmanda offers cloud backup for small businesses

Zmanda CEO Chander Kant tells CBS News & CNET Technology Analyst Larry Magid how his company is providing online "cloud" data backup services for small businesses. Rather than store the data itself, Zmanda is contracting with Amazon's S3 Simple Storage Service to store its customers' data.

The company sells an easy to use Windows program that connects directly with Amazon's S3 backup servers. The software costs $50 and the storage costs 20 cents per gigabyte per month.

S3 offers affordable graphics card for home theater

Hard-core gamers might laugh at this, but if you have a budget PC that you want to upgrade cheaply to be a media center that can play high-definition content on the big TV screen, then S3 Graphics has something for you.

The company announced Thursday the latest addition to its power-efficient Chrome 500 Series graphics processor family, the 850MHz DDR3-based Chrome 540 GTX GPU. The new GPU is capable of handling dual-stream Blu-ray and HD videos. It features a DisplayPort digital interface and HDMI and dual-link DVI and therefore supports connectivity to the latest digital monitors and HDTVs.

The new … Read more

Mosso challenges Amazon on cloud storage

On their blog today, Rackspace's cloud division, Mosso, shows off a study they did where they compared the costs and performance of Amazon Web Service's S3 storage service and CloudFront Content Delivery Network (CDN) against Mosso's combination of CloudFiles and their partnership with CDN provider, Limelight Networks. The blog post presents five common use cases, and compares the cost of CloudFiles/Limelight with the Amazon offerings, both with and without Amazon's support option.

I spent some time on the phone yesterday with Mosso co-founder, Jonathan Bryce, and Senior Cloud Architect for Rackspace's cloud division, Erik Carlin, discussing what they found. The short-short version is that, for the five use cases they analyzed, they claim (not surprisingly) that Mosso beats Amazon's offerings in simplicity, cost and performance, especially when support is taken into account.… Read more

Oracle and backups in the Cloud

Last week Oracle and Amazon Web Services held a webinar to outline how Oracle works on Amazon's EC2, including database backups to the Cloud.

Running Oracle on EC2 is not too thrilling, though it's likely welcome for many organizations. Oracle database licensing fees are similar to on-premises pricing with no immediate way to leverage an on-demand usage model. Basically, if you want/need to run Oracle in the Cloud you can. But you aren't looking at a huge cost advantage.

More interesting is the ability to run backups to the Cloud and take advantage of Amazon's … Read more

Europeana crash prevention: Cloud and memcached

When I read today that Europeana, a digital library of Europe's cultural heritage "crashed just hours after it went online and will be out of operation for several weeks" I was pretty shocked.

How a website could crash and be offline for weeks in this age of flexible-scale Cloud offerings and caching technology is a bit mind-boggling--especially considering that a properly architected website should be easily portable to larger hardware or a scaled-out system.

There are a great many ways to deal with traffic bursts, from using Amazon S3 for storage, or EC2 for more machines, to … Read more

Amazon's Linux cloud computing out of beta, joined by Windows

A central part of Amazon's online computing foundation is growing up.

The Elastic Compute Cloud, a service that gives customers on-demand access to Linux servers, is now out of beta testing, said Jeff Barr, evangelist for the collection of online options collectively called Amazon Web Services.

"Amazon EC2 is now in full production," Barr said in a blog post Thursday. And as promised, EC2 now offers Windows in a beta test, joining Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris and Solaris Express Community Edition.

Along with those moves, EC2 now comes with a service level agreement, a formal commitment that the … Read more

Amazon drops S3 prices

Amazon.com has announced that it is dropping prices for heavy users of its hosted storage service, S3. The baseline monthly fee of 15 cents per gigabyte of storage remains, but high-volume users will be able to take advantage of a tiered pricing model.

After 50 terabytes, the cost goes down to 14 cents a gigabyte; for more than 500TB, it's at 12 cents. See the new pricing chart.

I asked an Amazon representative if the company is reducing prices just because it could, or if it was the company's way of helping to bail out tech companies … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 812: No, we have no politics today

Yes, we talk about politicians, and we crack a couple of non-jokes about politics, but we're definitely not talking about politics. Because we want us all to get along. Natali Del Conte joins the Buzz crew today to bid a (fond?) farewell to the Gates-Seinfeld ads, talk about Mark Zuckerberg and all his money, and whether Windows 7 can save the day.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

EPISODE 812

Latest Microsoft Vista ad defends “I’m a PC” guy: Seinfeld out http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/007763.html http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=2639

Windows 7 … Read more