A new report says there's little stopping Europe catching up to the US in
cloud computing. The study, carried out by the London School of Economics and
Political Science and commissioned by Microsoft, looked at the projected
economic impact of cloud computing on the aerospace and smartphone services
industries in the UK, USA, Germany and Italy from 2010-2014.
The full report [PDF] is titled ‘Modelling the Cloud’, by Jonathan
Liebenau, Patrik Karrberg, Alexander Grous and Daniel Castro.
Investing in cloud computing, says the study, contributes to growth and job
creation in both the fast-growing, high-tech smartphone services industry as
well as the longstanding and slow-growth aerospace sector. In addition, it is
directly creating employment through the construction, staffing and supply of
data centers, which will host the cloud. Using cloud computing enables
business... (more)
You may have seen Amazon’s announcement of the AWS Storage Gateway beta
here, here, and here. Truth be told, the cloud storage gateway market is
starting to catch fire.
Amazon’s move validates the need for an iSCSI cloud storage gateway to
easily deliver cloud storage into business environments and acknowledges that
integration through APIs is not a process businesses will easily embrace. The
deeper implication is that gateways facilitate the adoption of cloud storage
as an alternative to on-premise or off-premise traditional storage, helping
Amazon tap into a large multi-billio... (more)
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the beta of their new storage
gateway functionality that enables access of Amazon S3 (Simple Storage
Services) from your different applications using an appliance installed in
your data center site.
With this beta launch, Amazon joins other startup vendors who are providing
standalone gateway appliance products (e.g. Nasuni, Certa, etc) along with
those who have disappeared from the market (e.g. Cirtas). In addition to
gateway vendors, there are also those with cloud access added to their
software tools such as (e.g. Jungle Disk that access... (more)
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 01/27/12 -- Gridstore, the leader in
grid-based scale-out NAS solutions, today announced that the company has been
chosen as a finalist for the Storage Magazine/SearchStorage.com 2011 Products
of the Year for storage systems. This category covered FC and iSCSI SAN, NAS,
multiprotocol systems, direct-attached storage (DAS), hard disk drives,
solid-state storage, disk controllers, caching appliances, storage
virtualization appliances and cloud storage gateway appliances.
Forty-eight enterprise data storage products in six categories have been
... (more)
As I write this post, 2012 is already 6.3% completed. So, for the remaining
93.7% of the year, what can we expect the storage themes to be? What will
companies be focused on and what can we expect from the vendors?
Data Reduction
The recent flooding in Thailand has had everyone on high alert about the rise
in disk prices, see this Register article as a good example. We are
normally used to seeing disk prices decline over time, however the start of
this year may see exactly the opposite. Suddenly all those data
optimisation (aka clean up) tasks you didn’t think were worth it, n... (more)