Archiving-software vendor Clearpace is launching a cloud-based archive service for structured data.
The Rainstor service, which was announced on Thursday, is aimed at organizations running costly legacy applications in the data center, as it provides secure, off-site storage of structured data.
The new service runs on Amazon's S3 cloud infrastructure, using Amazon's EC2 for processing power. The idea behind the service is that by externalizing their legacy data into a cloud, businesses do not have to spend money on buying and servicing their own on-site, hardware-based storage, said Julian Cook, marketing and strategy director at Gloucester, U.K.-based Clearpace.
The Clearpace launch follows the announcement of EMC's Atmos online storage-as-a-service, which launched earlier this week at EMC World 2009. However, EMC's cloud offering is really designed to support unstructured data such as files and photos, said Henry Baltazar, a storage and systems analyst at the 451 Group.
"There really aren't many cloud-archiving options for structured data, because to archive structured data, you need a database application to provide the access," Baltazar said.
Clearpace expects most users of Rainstor to sign up through its independent software vendor partners, which currently embed its NParchive storage appliance. "Customers will use the appliance that we provide, and the ISV provides the necessary application," said Cook.
Customers signing up to the Rainstor service will be charged an all-inclusive fee of $1 (62p) per gigabyte, per month for the product.
Baltazar expects more archiving vendors to begin offering cloud-based services, as the security and management tools improve.
"I think it's still really early days, but we have seen a number of cloud services suitable for unstructured data from the likes of EMC. There is certainly a lot of demand for the same kind of service for structured data, if only because it could save a good deal of money if you can retire those seldom-used applications from the data center."
Sally Whittle of ZDNet UK reported from London.
Amazon.com's cloud-computing arm has added new features to help users monitor cloud resources, adjust capacity, and balance traffic loads.
In an announcement Monday, Amazon Web Services unveiled a public beta of the three new features: the CloudWatch monitoring service, Auto Scaling for on-demand capacity adjustments, and Elastic Load Balancing for redistributing traffic.
The new features are available immediately to users in the U.S., according to a company blog, with availability in Europe set to follow in the next few months.
"You can use these services to make your...applications perform better without sacrificing application control, freedom of development, choice of tools, speed of deployment, or any other kind of flexibility," according to the blog post.
For the past three years, Amazon Web Services has been offering on-demand computing and storage through its Elastic Cloud Compute service, known as EC2, and its Simple Storage Service, known as S3. The company says it deals with 80,000 work requests per second and stores 52 billion objects.
Toby Wolpe of ZDNet UK reported from London.
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 service will be available at least 99.95 percent of the time. This type of agreement makes it easier for businesses to place faith in the service. Previously, only the only AWS component with a service level agreement was the Simple Storage Service (S3), which provides online data storage.
Customers pay for AWS according to how much they need: more servers, more storage space, and more network capacity means more charges. But unlike with computing infrastructure built in-house, when customers don't need it anymore, they can stop paying for it. AWS has had outages, but it continues to gain in popularity, and Amazon has been lowering some AWS prices.
Amazon collects multiple gigabits of monitoring data each second for its Elastic Compute Cloud servce.
(Credit: Amazon.com)Barr also described features that signal growing sophistication for AWS overall in 2009 that should make it easier to administer AWS--either manually or by letting it run itself better. Barr listed four areas:
• Management Console: The management console will simplify the process of configuring and operating your applications in the AWS cloud. You'll be able to get a global picture of your cloud computing environment using a point-and-click web interface.
• Load Balancing: The load-balancing service will allow you to balance incoming requests and traffic across multiple EC2 instances.
• Automatic Scaling: The auto-scaling service will allow you to grow and shrink your usage of EC2 capacity on demand based on application requirements.
• Cloud Monitoring: The cloud-monitoring service will provide real time, multidimensional monitoring of host resources across any number of EC2 instances, with the ability to aggregate operational metrics across instances, Availability Zones, and time slots.
In a separate blog post, Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogel described some of Amazon's work in ensuring reliability and efficiency.
"We relentlessly measure every possible resource usage parameter, every application counter, and every customer's experience. Many gigabits per second of monitoring data flows continuously through the Amazon networks to make sure that our customers are getting serviced at the levels they can expect and at an efficiency level the business desires," Vogel said.
Among the customers using the Windows version of EC2 are Autodesk, RenderRocket, and Eli Lilly, Amazon said.
"This is a huge step forward in maximizing our results relative to IT spend, and now that Amazon EC2 runs Windows and SQL Server, we have even greater flexibility in the kinds of applications we can build in the AWS cloud," Dave Powers, an Eli Lilly associate information consultant who uses the service to process research data, gushed in a statement.
Autodesk uses EC2 for back-end data processing tasks, said Mike Haley, a senior architect of search engineering, and RenderRocket uses the service for 3D film and TV graphics work for TV and movies, Amazon said.
Customers affected by Sunday's outage of Amazon's Simple Storage Service, an online data storage plan, won't have to do anything to get credit for the hours-long glitch.
Some Amazon Web Services were down for hours on July 20.
(Credit: Amazon)"We'll be announcing on the developer forum momentarily that we'll be waiving our standard SLA (service-level agreement) process and applying the appropriate service credit to all affected customers for the July billing period," the company said Monday evening in a statement about the S3 outage. "Customers will not need to send us an e-mail to request their credits, as these will be automatically applied. This transaction will be reflected in our customers' August billing statements."
S3 provides an online mechanism where customers can pay to store data according to the amount they need stored. It's one of a host of Amazon Web Services, but it's the only one so far covered by a service-level agreement that promises high reliability.
Amazon's S3 and the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are two of prominent examples of the concept of cloud computing, in which specialists offer online services on which others can base their own applications. Another variety of cloud computing offers more specific services such as online e-mail or office suites from Zoho, Google, Adobe, and Yahoo.
Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service, S3, spent a few hours Sunday in a big pothole on the road to the glorious cloud computing future, with an outage taking the storage system offline for several hours Sunday. Should we be surprised?
No. In short, the computing industry is making up what's called cloud computing as it goes along, often with a server and networking architecture that's one part improvisation to two parts proven best practice. Frankly, it's notable to me that some services are as reliable as they are.
Some Amazon Web Services were down for hours on July 20.
(Credit: Amazon)Computing practices tend to gravitate toward one of two poles. One is tight control, higher prices, and high reliability. The other is openness, lower cost, but some degree of flakiness. High-end mainframes and Unix servers can handle transaction loads that would crush most machines using Intel or AMD x86 processors, but they cost more and are less adaptable. Most of the cutting-edge, large-scale action in the Internet--including various cloud computing efforts--is happening with the more free-wheeling technology.
One company operating at colossal scale, Google, has concluded it's better to buy cheap x86 servers and write software that automatically paves over hardware failures. The bigger problem comes when a large system composed of many interacting components loses track of its self-conception, and rebooting a single system or swapping out a hard drive isn't sufficient.
Essentially, Amazon had to reboot S3. Here's how the company described its S3 problem in a statement:
"As a distributed system, the different components of S3 need to be aware of the state of each other. For example, this awareness makes it possible for the system to decide which redundant physical storage server to route a request to. We experienced a problem with those internal system communications, leaving the components unable to interact properly, and customers unable to successfully process requests. After exploring several alternatives, the team determined it had to take the service offline to restore proper communication and then bring service online again. These are sophisticated systems and it generally takes a while to get to root cause in such a situation," Amazon said. "We will be providing our customers with more information when we've fully investigated the incident."
Afterward, Om Malik called cloud computing frail: "The S3 outage points to a bigger (and a larger) issue: the cloud has many points of failure--routers crashing, cable getting accidentally cut, load balancers getting misconfigured, or simply bad code. And he's right, to a degree, but there are three things that shouldn't be overlooked before writing cloud computing off as a failure.
• First, you should compare the problems of cloud computing to the alternatives, including running computing services in-house. Last I checked, corporate data centers also have crashing routers, bad code, and misconfigured load balancers.
• Second, you can expect reliability to increase as the companies providing cloud infrastructure and services figure out explore the terra igcognita.
• Third, don't confuse Web 2.0 with the foundational elements of cloud computing. A Web site that uses an online application at another site to mash up data from some other sites then present it using a service from yet another site is indeed susceptible to numerous points of failure. But a single-purpose infrastructure such as Amazon S3 is at least in theory a more tightly controlled, single-purpose utility that can offer higher reliability.
That's not to excuse Amazon's outage or gloss over the effect it had on business partners reliant on it. After all, S3 is the sole part of Amazon Web Services that comes with a service level agreement to promise customers reliability.
But a little silver lining to this particular cloud problem is that Amazon is setting expectations at the right level: They said in a statement, "Any downtime is unacceptable, and we won't be satisfied until it is perfect."
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