Cloud Backup and Recovery Journal

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)

Cloud Storage Gateway Market Starting to Catch Fire

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's Cloud Storage Gateway Reviewed

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)

Gridstore Named Finalist for 2011 Products of the Year by Storage Magazine for Their Scale-Out NAS Solution

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)

What to Watch in Storage for 2012

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)