Amazon Web Services plans to make the Oracle Database 11g R2 available on its Relational Database Service (RDS) next quarter.
RDS is a service designed to let customers install, run and scale relational databases in the cloud. Until now, only the MySQL database was an option on RDS, a service Amazon said is used by thousands of customers.
"As with today's MySQL offering, Amazon RDS running Oracle database will reduce administrative overhead and expense by maintaining database software, taking continuous backups for point-in-time recovering, and exposing key operational metrics via Amazon CloudWatch," said Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr, in a blog post. CloudWatch is a service that lets customers monitor their AWS cloud resources.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 10, 20110 comments
In my Redmond magazine cover story this month, Clouds Collide in Strategic Microsoft vs. Google Battle,I reported how fiercely the two companies are going after each other in the hosted e-mail and Web productivity space.
Google is trying to eat into Microsoft's cash cows: Windows, Exchange, SharePoint and Office -- and the article explains how. While Microsoft likes to tout missing features in Google Apps, it's a moving target. Google frequently updates Google Apps.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 10, 20110 comments
Expenditures for public cloud services will grow to nearly $30 billion over the next three years, according to a report released this week by market researcher IDC.
The latest forecast projects a compounded annual growth rate of 21.6 percent since 2009 when revenues were $11 billion. With a number of reports showing robust growth for cloud computing services, this one is noteworthy because it looks at public cloud service revenues from 18 vertical industries.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 10, 20110 comments
Google's decision to name Larry Page to replace Eric Schmidt as CEO caught me and everyone else who follows the company off guard. After all, Google was showing quarter-over-quarter revenue and profit growth that most companies would kill for. But in retrospect, the handwriting was on the wall.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on January 25, 20111 comments
NASA and Rackspace Hosting last week commemorated the six-month anniversary of their open-source cloud effort by announcing it has more than 40 partners on board. One of those partners, Internap Network Services, said it is building a cloud storage platform based on OpenStack.
Rackspace chairman Graham Weston believes OpenStack will become a key factor in open-source cloud computing. The goal is to provide portability among cloud providers who build their infrastructures on OpenStack. "At Rackspace we think OpenStack is the next Linux," Weston said in a company-produced video posted on the OpenStack Web site.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on January 25, 20110 comments
Startup NephoScale came out of stealth mode last week and says it is gunning to take on the likes of Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Hosting and GoGrid. Audacious as that might sound, the Silicon Valley startup is a self-funded infrastructure-as-a-service cloud provider that is touting its scalability, a planned global presence and an API designed to provide simplified provisioning and management.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on January 25, 20110 comments
Skytap, a cloud provider that offers virtual data centers for application testing and deployment, this week said it has received a $10 million infusion.
The Series C round of funding came from Open View Venture Partners, putting the total venture investment in Skytap at $23.5 million. Skytap's existing investors include Madrona Venture Group, Ignition Partners, Bezos Expeditions and Washington Research Foundation.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on January 06, 20110 comments
Microsoft is getting ready to launch the newest datacenter for its cloud services. The new facility, in Quincy, Wash., will go live early this year, Microsoft announced this week.
It incorporates much of the principals of its Chicago and Dublin datacenters, notes Kevin Timmons, Microsoft's general manager of datacenter services.
Timmons points out that there are some nuances. The Dublin facility uses server PODs, which rely on outside air to reduce cooling costs. The Chicago datacenter, by comparison uses Microsoft's IT Pre-Assembled Components (ITPACs.). Quincy will use the ITPACs.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on January 06, 20110 comments
A survey of mid-sized companies employing less than 1,000 people found that nearly half don't understand what the cloud is.
Fielded by cloud provider Vitacore Systems, the survey found 48 percent are confused about the cloud. Despite the fact that they use Salesforce.com or Google Docs, 54 percent said they had no idea they were using a cloud service.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on January 06, 20111 comments
Amazon Web Services (AWS) seems to be getting its house in order when it comes to compliance certifications. The company said last week it has achieved Level 1 compliance with the Payment Card Industry, or PCI, Data Security Standard.
PCI is the standard for storing, processing and transmitting credit card data. AWS lack of PCI compliance was a key barrier to those companies looking to use the cloud provider's service to handle transactions.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on December 14, 20100 comments
Salesforce.com put its partners, customers and competitors on notice that it doesn't want to just be known as a cloud-based CRM provider. Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff wants his company to play in the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) space and he made a number of interesting moves to help achieve that goal.
Benioff gave two consecutive keynote addresses this week at Salesforce.com's annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco where more than 23,000 stakeholders were in attendance to hear an avalanche of announcements.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on December 09, 20103 comments
Amazon Web Services is on longer hosting WikiLeaks -- the 250,000-plus classified State Department documents and cables that include disclosures about the nuclear ambitions of Iran, candid comments from world leaders and numerous other revelations of confidential matters. The United States government has condemned the Wikileaks release saying it is putting lives at risk and compromising national security.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on December 02, 20100 comments