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Friday, January 23rd, 2015
| Time | Event |
| 1:00p | Of the Big Three Cloud Providers AWS Was Most Reliable in 2014 Users of Amazon Web Services saw fewer service interruptions than users of the other two big providers of public cloud infrastructure services – Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure – in 2014, according to two different companies that analyze cloud downtime. Azure saw more than 500 service interruptions and two major outages last year, according to CloudEndure, a company that helps companies migrate applications onto public cloud infrastructure. AWS experienced about 230 service interruptions and no widespread outages, according to CloudEndure. CloudEndure’s analysis, released this month, is consistent with that of CloudHarmony, which specializes in cloud reliability analysis. CloudHarmony’s CloudSquare service provides much more granular data across many more providers than CloudHarmony does. Amazon EC2, the compute component of AWS, saw about 10 outages across multiple regions in 2014, lasting from 19 seconds to about 9 minutes, according to CloudHarmony. Google Compute Engine had about 60 that lasted from 10 seconds to 37 minutes. Azure Virtual Machines saw more than 100 outages, lasting from 10 seconds to about 12 hours on one occasion. Each outage CloudHarmony tracks is an outage of an entire region, versus service errors tracked by CloudEndure. Azure’s big multi-region outages happened in August, when the provider reported full service interruptions across multiple regions, and in November, when about 20 services were interrupted in most of its availability zones. The 12-hour single-zone outage was on November 5 in the asia-east zone, which went down multiple times that day and once on the preceding day. The uptime ranking of the three providers’ storage services was different. Google Cloud Storage had eight single-zone outages during 2014; Amazon’s S3 service had about 20; and Azure Object Storage saw nearly 140 outages. Azure and AWS error rates reduced consistently throughout the year. AWS went from 127 errors in the first quarter to 26 in Q4, according to CloudEndure. Azure went from about 260 errors in Q1 to about 200 in Q4. CloudEndure has not analyzed Google’s cloud reliability record. As Ofir Ehrlich, vice president of research and development at CloudEndure, pointed out in a blog post, service providers’ ability to maintain uptime is important, but the top reason user applications go down is human error. To guard against that, it’s important to set up resilient multi-region failover architecture whatever cloud provider you’re using. The most resilient option is being able to failover from one provider to another. As Verizon Cloud Services demonstrated earlier this month, outages across a single provider’s entire cloud are possible. The two days of downtime were intentional, to apply some upgrades, yet customers that did not set up cross-provider failover had to accept the unusually long maintenance window. Verizon later said part of the upgrade was to make it possible to apply updates in the background, without taking services offline. |
| 5:00p | Friday Funny: Pick the Best Caption for Tall Data Center Another busy work week is nearing its end and we’ve got that Friday Funny feeling! Help us celebrate the weekend’s arrival with our Data Center Knowledge Caption Contest! Here’s how it works: Diane Alber, the Arizona artist who created Kip and Gary, creates a cartoon and we challenge our readers to submit a humorous and clever caption that fits the comedic situation. Then we ask our readers to vote for the best submission and the winner receives a signed print of the cartoon. Several great submissions came in for last week’s cartoon – now all we need is a winner. Help us out by submitting your vote below! Take Our PollFor previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel. And for more of Diane’s work, visit Kip and Gary’s website! |
| 5:40p | Amazon Buys Stealthy Israeli Chip Startup Annapurna Labs Amazon has acquired Israeli startup Annapurna Labs for an estimated $350-$400 million, according to The Wall Street Journal and other sources. The semiconductor development firm has been in stealth mode since 2011, so not much is known about the company. It develops networking chips and designs to make data centers run efficiently and has close to a hundred employees. Amazon Web Services, the company’s public cloud infrastructure services business, aims to run as efficiently as possible leveraging economies of scale and in-house engineering. One potential reason for the acquisition could be to further improve data center efficiency. AWS revenue is in the billions (cloud revenue isn’t broken out in earnings). With increasing cloud pricing pressure from the likes of Google and Microsoft, Annapurna’s technology might help Amazon stay a step ahead by improving margins. The cloud war is dependent on the data center. Google is known to be investing deeply in the data center, which recently prompted Fidelity Contrafund to cut its stake in the Internet giant. Annapurna’s webpage has very little information, featuring a barren landscape. The company lists job openings for those with passion for computer architecture, chip design, software architecture, open source projects, or system design. “Annapurna Labs put together some of the best talent to address significant industry challenges,” a quote from Avigdor Willenz, founder and CEO of Galileo Technology, states. “In my experience their talent, innovation, and open culture is unmatched in the semiconductor industry.” The Israeli tech scene, full of talent and innovative startups, continues to be important for the IT industry at large. Amazon has an office in Israel to help Israeli startups work with AWS. Its recent event in Tel Aviv had 15,000 or so in attendance. Cloud document and storage firm Dropbox acquired Israeli-based startup CloudOn earlier this week, which brought mobile document editing capabilities for Microsoft Office to the Dropbox platform. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba invested in Israel’s Visualead, which develops QR codes that are flashier than the typical black and white ones you see in magazines. |
| 5:55p | Enterprise Analytics Startup Interana Raises $20M Interana, the event-based enterprise analytics company founded by former Facebook engineers Bobby Johnson and Lior Abraham has raised $20 million in a Series B financing round led by Index Ventures, with participation from existing investors investors Battery Ventures, Data Collective and Fuel Capital. The company has now raised a total of $28.2 million since it launched two years ago. The Silicon Valley startup hopes to bring Facebook-like visuals to enterprise analytics and deliver visual data discovery tools that are easy to use. Only 75 days out of stealth mode, the company says it has already seen demand for its product. Interana has set up multiple proof-of-concept deployments with potential customers and recruited employees from companies such as Datameer, Elance, Netflix, Oracle, and Symantec. “This is a new form of analytics where streaming data and data at rest are analyzed together, enabling companies to reach the elusive goal of seeing how real-time snapshots fit into historical trends,” Tony Baer, principal analyst at market research firm Ovum, said in a statement. “Traditionally, enterprises have required separate analytic tools and data platforms to put those pieces together. Interana’s event-based analytics solution allows companies to analyze click stream logs, feature usage, and place that in the historical perspective of how they have acted with the customer, which is a whole new way of looking at data.” Mike Volpi, general partner at Index ventures, will join the startup’s board.
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| 8:12p | Report: Court Orders The Data Centers to Pay $1.4M to Contractors Delaware Superior Court ruled in favor of three consultants that sued The Data Centers for unpaid fees and interest, leaving TDC liable for $1.4 million total, Delaware Online reported. TDC was the developer behind the failed data center construction project planned in Newark, Delaware, that included a co-generation power plant. The company was going to build on a property that belonged to the University of Delaware, but the university terminated the lease with TDC after much opposition by residents in the surrounding community. This was one example of a major data center construction project that didn’t happen because of community opposition. Another project is currently in danger of meeting the same fate in Haymarket, Virginia, where residents are protesting a plan by the local utility to build a new power transmission line to feed a planned Amazon data center. The issue in Virginia has become so contentious, that two state legislators have written a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos directly, asking the company to consider alternatives. One of the legislators also proposed a new law that, if passed, could effectively block the project. TDC has said it was looking for an alternative location for its project, Maryland being one of the options. The original plan was to build a large data center and a 279 megawatt combined heat-and-power generation plant that would power the data center and feed energy into the local utility grid. Besides the two lawsuits against TDC by three contractors seeking to get paid for services they have provided, one of the partners in TDC has filed a lawsuit against another. In the lawsuit, former TDC president Robert Krizman claimed that CEO Earl Eugene Kern kept him in the dark about company business, while running up millions in debt the company couldn’t repay. Two of the winners in the recent court ruling are engineering firm Duffield Associates and site project manager Constructive Management, which filed a joint breach-of-contract lawsuit against TDC, claiming the developer owed them about $1.39 million in unpaid invoices and interest. The third winner is Econsult Solutions, an economic consulting services company, which looked to recover about $18,600 plus interest from the developer. |
| 9:26p | Cloud Storage Company Box (Finally) Launches IPO, Share Prices Rise 65 Percent
This article originally appeared at The WHIR Cloud storage and collaboration company Box debuted on the New York Stock Exchange at $14 and rose as much as 65 percent on Friday. Box has been operating at a net loss, but revenue appears to be catching up. For the most recent quarter on record, which ended Oct. 31. 2014, revenue was $57 million, a 70 percent rise from the same period a year earlier. In this period, its net loss shrank to $45.4 million. Its current stock prices value Box at $2.8 billion – which exceeds the $2.4 billion valuation from its private-funding round in July, as well as an IPO proposal from late 2013 that placed its value at just less than $2 billion. Read about Box’s data center strategy and more interesting tidbits here In an interview with CNBC, Box CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie said Box is making its biggest gains going after the enterprise market, noting that there’s a misconception that Box is in the consumer space. It now has 44,000 paying organizations and 32 million registered users, which gives it significant market share. Box, however, has been racking up big sales and marketing expenses. Yet, despite the high cost of attracting new enterprise customers, Levie said that once customers are acquired, they tend to expand their services and increase revenue per customer, allowing Box to recoup its costs of acquiring an individual customer after two years. To differentiate itself from other cloud storage services, Box also allows companies to build custom applications and customizations on its platform around areas like security. Meanwhile, there is stiff competition in the file synchronization and sharing market, which IDC expects to be worth a total of $2.3 billion in 2018, growing 23.1 percent on average per year from now until then. In IDC’s latest figures on marketshare, Dropbox has 27 percent , Microsoft has 17 percent, and Box has 14 percent of the overall FSS market. Dropbox has been valued at as much as $10 billion and has 100,000 paying customers. It is actively trying to add enterprise-friendly features, and just this week bought startup CloudOn, which provides cloud-based productivity applications that can be accessed on any device. There are also new entrants such as Huddle, a security-focused cloud platform which counts public sector among government agencies such as NASA as customers. As well, there is competition from a whole other category of services such as BitTorrent Syncand Mega which allow users to store and sync files across trusted devices via Peer-2-Peer technology. This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/c |
| 11:23p | Google Launches Private Docker Container Registry Service As enterprises test the waters to see how well Docker containers work for their developers and applications they make, security becomes an ever more crucial point to address. The predominant way container images have been stored has been a public registry accessible over the Internet and maintained by Docker, the company. That’s not good enough for security- and compliance-sensitive enterprise users, and several alternatives have emerged. New York startup Quay.io started with a hosted private registry for Docker containers. In August 2014, another startup, called CoreOS, acquired Quay.io and very quickly introduced a version of the registry users could deploy in their own data centers, behind their own firewalls. In December, Docker, a company built around a piece of open source technology, previewed a private container image registry as its first commercial product. Docker Hub Enterprise can be hosted on premises or hosted in private or public clouds. Google, which has been using containers to run its own infrastructure for years and which has been a big supporter of Docker ever since it was born, today took things a step further. The company announced a private container registry service running on the Google Cloud Platform. The aim is to give users a secure private registry but without the pain of securing and managing it. Online retailer zulily is one of the first users of the Google Container Registry. “Private registries help, but they need valid certificates, authentication and firewalls, backups, and monitoring,” Steve Reed, principal engineer at zulily, said in a statement. “Google’s container registry provides us with a complete Docker registry that we integrate into our development and deployment workflow with little effort.” The service hosts a user’s private images in Google Cloud Storage under the user’s Google Cloud Platform project. This way, the only people who can access the images are people that have access to the project. They can push and pull images through the Google Cloud SDK command line. Images are automatically encrypted before being written to disk. They are cached in Google’s data centers and can be deployed to Google Container Engine clusters or container-optimized VMs available on Google Compute Engine. The service is currently in beta and so comes free of charge, for now. The only thing the users have to pay for is cloud storage capacity used to store the images and network resources they consume. |
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