Archive for the ‘Cloud’ Category

Data center provider Equinix launches Marketplace service

Wednesday, October 26th, 2011

Equinix has introduced the Equinix Marketplace, a new service that enables any company with a presence in any Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data center to quickly find and directly connect to a global value-chain of more than 4,000 potential partners, customers and suppliers of digital services.

Equinix is a provider of global data center servicesEquinix Marketplace soughts to help companies more effectively reach new customers, offer new services, and connect to members of their digital supply chain to improve application performance, reduce cost and generate revenue.

By creating a custom profile and storefront in the Equinix Marketplace, sellers of services, ranging from network connectivity to private clouds to alternative trading systems, can drive sales by promoting their services to other participants—thousands of potential customers or partners that are a simple cross-connect away in Equinix data centers.

“AboveNet is excited about the opportunity to participate in the Equinix Marketplace. The Equinix Marketplace provides AboveNet an additional marketing channel to reach prospective customers to deliver our low latency High Bandwidth Connectivity solutions to Equinix facilities,” said Nick Ridolfi, senior vice president of sales for AboveNet.Currently, the vertical ecosystems inside Equinix data centers include companies such as Bloomberg, Verizon, Syniverse, GoGrid, and Abovenet.  These companies are already connecting and doing business with customers and partners that are also inside Equinix, and now the Equinix Marketplace makes it even easier to do so.

Platform Equinix is home to ecosystems containing thousands of digital-driven enterprises including more than 700 cloud and IT service providers, 675 high-performance backbone and mobile networks, 450 online media, content and advertising destinations, and 600 electronic trading and financial market participants.

Buyers, on the other hand, can quickly locate the right services in the right data center locations from the suppliers now available in the Equinix Marketplace. This reduces the time-to-market to integrate with new partners and deploy new services, to reduce costs and improve the performance and efficiency of their digital supply chain.

New wireless streaming media player: WD TV Live

Saturday, October 15th, 2011

The S$189 WD TV Live is an easy to use Wi-Fi enabled media player that can stream media either from a network attached storage drive in the local network, or directly from the Internet – via an Ethernet connection or the high performance 802.11n wireless connectivity.

Western Digital WD TV Live wireless streaming media player

Western Digital WD TV Live wireless streaming media player

If you don’t already own an Apple TV or Google TV, check out WD TV Live from Western Digital.

Western Digital WD TV Live streaming media playerThe Wi-Fi enabled media player comes with its own apps to stream media from Internet video, radio and social networking sites such as YouTube, Dailymotion, Facebook, Picassa Web Albums, and TuneIn Radio directly to your TV in Full-HD 1080p resolution. Dailymotion video service is now included to offer video

WD TV Live also includes Fun Spot Games, a casual gaming service that offers arcade, strategy, and card games, puzzles, and quizzes. Some of these games include Sudoku, Black Jack and Poker.

WD TV Live allows users to enjoy personal media such as photos, video and music on their home entertainment systems.

Access Internet media content using WD TV Live in Full-HD 1080p resolution.

Access Internet media content using WD TV Live in Full-HD 1080p resolution.

It supports a wide range of file formats for streaming content from any connected USB drive, digital camcorder or camera, network drive such as the My Book Live personal cloud storage, and any networked PC or Mac computer in the home.

Personal cloud from Western Digital

Friday, October 14th, 2011

Western Digital offers an easy way to set up a personal private cloud to share documents and media – using the WD My Book Live network drive and mobile apps for Android and iOS smart phones and tablets.

The drives comes in 1TB (S$209), 2TB (S$239), and 3TB (S$299) capacities and are priced roughly US$50 more than non-network external drives with the same capacity.

Western Digital CorporationI’d posted not long ago about setting up a home shared network hard drive in order to share documents and media – photos, music and video – in a private personal cloud in the comfort of the home.

That was followed with a case study of setting up and using the Seagate GoFlex Home storage system – a similar network attached storage (NAS) drive.

My Book Live is a network attached storage drive from Western Digital

My Book Live is a network attached storage drive from Western Digital

The WD My Book Live network drive from Western Digital is also connected directly to the wireless router to plug into the home wireless network. Both Macs and PCs can store, access and share documents, as well as stream media from the drive.

With all the buzz about consumer public clouds and enterprise private and hybrid (private/public) clouds, the WD My Book Live makes it simple to set up your personal private cloud with the hard-disk and data physically sitting in the security of your home.

Access to this personal cloud can be extended beyond the home to the Internet. Any computer given the access rights can access the shared documents and media on the WD My Book Live through www.WD2go.com.

My Book Live comes in capacities of 1TB, 2TB and 3TB

My Book Live comes in capacities of 1TB, 2TB and 3TB

In addition, Android and iOS mobile devices (both smart phones and tablets) can get mobile access to the files stored on the drive via the WD2go apps from Western Digital. The WD Photos and basic WD2go app are free and allows viewing files and streaming media from the WD My Book Live.

For US$2.99, the WD2g Pro app adds the ability to “clip” files – basically download a local copy of files and media to the mobile device; and allow users to share files by emailing either a copy of the files or a link to the WD My Book Live.

Note that once the link is sent out, anybody with the link will have access to that file. There is no expiry date for the sharing, like in Seagate’s GoFlex Home. The only way to stop sharing that file is to either remove that file or rename it – but that affects everybody to whom you’ve sent that link to.

Naturally, both the network drive and the router must be connected and powered up for access. And access from mobile devices is only via the apps over the Internet – instead of direct access over the local home wireless network.

That means that even if you’re at home, the app in your smart phone or tablet will still have to go to the Internet (via wireless or 3G) and come back into the home wireless network to access the files on the WD My Book Live. This is similar to the GoFlex Home.

But Western Digital does not limit the number of users or computers that can share the WD My Book Live. The GoFlex Home limits the number of users/computers that can be set up to connect with it to just 5. GoFlex Home customers need to subscribe to pay to enjoy unlimited connections.

Capacity WD
My Book Live
Seagate
GoFlex Home
1 TB S$209 S$179
2 TB S$239 S$239
3 TB S$299 S$339

WD My Book Live features a built-in media server that streams music, photos and movies to any DLNA-certified multimedia device such as a WD TV Live network media player, Blu-ray Disc player, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and connected TV.

My Book Live comes in capacities of 1TB, 2TB and 3TB and is compatible with both Windows and Mac OS, as well as DLNA/UPnP enabled devices.

Western Digital envisages a connected lifestyle

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

Western Digital launches a slew of media storage, networking and playback products for the connected lifestyle.

Western Digital My Book Live personal cloud storage

Western Digital My Book Live personal cloud storage

The premise of the Connected Life solution from Western Digital is the simple set-up of a private personal cloud where media can be accessed and shared from any computer at home.

This personal cloud can also be extended into the Internet so that mobile devices such as smart phones and tablet computers can also access data and media in the cloud using apps, while computers can use a browser interface.

The centrepiece of the Connected Life solution from Western Digital is the My Book Live network attached storage. With capacities ranging from 1TB to 3TB, these network capable external hard drives are connected directly to the wireless router at home so that any computer – be it a Mac or a PC – can store and access the media in the drive.

Western Digital WD TV Live streaming media player

Western Digital WD TV Live streaming media player

The WD TV Live media player that is connected to the wireless network can then stream media from My Book Live and play photos, music and videos on a large TV screen. It can also stream media directly from Internet services such as YouTube.

Outside home, data and media on My Book Live can be accessed on mobile devices using WD apps WD 2go (free), WD 2go Pro (US$2.99), and WD Photos (free).

Let’s talk iPhone: Executive Summary

Wednesday, October 5th, 2011

Tim Cook delivered his first major product launch since taking over from Steve Jobs as the CEO. The main anticipation for an iPhone 5 did not come through. Instead an iPhone 4S with changed out innards was offered. By the way, Steve Jobs was absent from the event

Let's talk iPhone launches iPhone 4S instead of iPhone 5

"Let's talk iPhone" launches iPhone 4S instead of iPhone 5

The headline for the launch was the iPhone 4S. Identical to the iPhone 4 in terms of external design and appearances, the innards have been completed changed out with much better components. These include a more powerful A5 dual-core CPU promising 2x the previous computing speed and 7x graphics performance, new 8 megapixel camera, full HD video, and iOS 5.

Other highlights inlcude Siri, the voice-activated intelligent assistant and iCloud, a set of cloud services that works and syncs with all the Apple devices a user owns.

New apps and iPod Touch and nano devices were also presented.

Here’s a quick executive summary of the various products launched, their prices (in the US and in Singapore), as well as when they would be available.

Product / Availability Prices

iPhone 4S

(black & white)

Oct 14:
US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan & UK
Oct 28:
22 countries including Singapore
Dec 2011:
Rest of the world

US prices (w 2 yrs contract):
16GB: US$199
32GB: US$299
64GB: US$399 

Singapore prices (incl GST):
iPhone 4S: TBA
iPhone 4: S$788
iPhone 3GS: S$548

Siri voice-activated intelligent assistant

Comes as Beta on iPhone 4S

Free

iOS 5

Available on Oct 12

Free software update via iTunes 10.5

Cards App

Available on Oct 12

US: US$2.99
Elsewhere: US$4.99

iCloud

Available on Oct 12

5GB: free
10GB: US$20/yr
20GB: US$40/yr
50GB: US$100/yr

iPod nano

(black & white)

Available today

US prices:
8GB: US$129
16GB: US$149  

Singapore prices (incl GST):
8GB: S$180
16GB: S$208

iPad Touch

(black & white)

Available on Oct 12

US prices:
8GB: US$199
32GB: US$299
64GB: US$399  

Singapore prices (incl GST):
8GB: S$288
32GB: S$428
64GB: S$588

Setting up and using the Seagate GoFlex Home storage system

Monday, September 26th, 2011

GoFlex Home is a consumer network attached storage (NAS) hard drive for the home. Easy to set up and use, it allows the access, sharing, streaming, and backup of files and media for computers, network TVs, media players and game consoles connected to the home wireless network.

The Seagate GoFlex Home comprises a drive dock and a hard drive.

The Seagate GoFlex Home comprises a drive dock and a hard drive.

Secure access can also be opened to computers and iOS/Android tablets and smartphones over the Internet.

Over the weekend, I helped my friend set up an NAS drive for his desktop, netbook, two laptops, iPhone and Android tablet. He had bought the Seagate GoFlex Home 3 TB storage drive during the recent COMEX 2011 but hadn’t had the time to set it up yet.

I helped by using eye-power because he decided to give it a go himself and actually got the thing working in less than 15 minutes. That was the reason why I recommended the drive in the first place, it works with most consumer home Wi-Fi routers with little set-up or configuration needed.

The GoFlex Home comes with two cables and an software installation CD. The following steps were all that was needed to get the personal storage cloud going:

1. Connect the GoFlex Home drive dock to the Wi-Fi router by using the provided Ethernet cable.

2. Pop the GoFlex hard drive into the GoFlex drive dock and plug the power supply into the drive dock and the wall outlet. Switch on the GoFlex Home by pressing the Power button on the drive dock.

3. Pop the CD (or download from Seagate’s website) into the computer (can be a Mac or Windows PC) to install the software needed to access the hard drive. Simply select a language, key in the product information found on the drive, give the drive a name and register it. The name has to be unique globally since it will be used to identify the drive should you access it from the Internet.

4. Install the software on other computers that require access to the shared drive. Up to 5 people/computers on the home network can access the GoFlex Home. By paying to subscribe to the Seagate Share Pro, you get access for an unlimited number of people/computers to the GoFlex Home.

There are three ways to access the drive. One is to use the installed Seagate Dashboard software (on Windows PCs), which allows all features of the drive to be configured and managed. You can add computers and user accounts, backup, access and share files as well.

Use Seagate Dashboard software to configure and manage GoFelx Home

Use Seagate Dashboard software to configure and manage GoFelx Home

The other way is to use a browser-based Seagate Share either for a computer in the home network or out in the Internet.

Seagate GoFlexAccess App

Free iOS/Android app

Both are easy to use with a simple interface, using drag-and-drop or standard dialog boxes we’re familar with.

The third method is via the appropriate free app on a iOS/Android smartphone or tablet, also over the Internet.

The GoFlex Home comes with a USB port which is very useful. You can connect an additional external hard drive to expand the capacity of the original GoFlex hard drive. You can also connect a USB hub for connecting more than one USB device.

In my friend’s case, he connected his printer to the USB port and all his computers on the Wi-Fi network got to share that printer. USB port on the drive dock for a HDD, printer or USB hubNo more plugging/unplugging the old printer from one computer to another.

The included backup software allows up to three connected computers to be automatically backed up to the GoFlex Home. Upgrade to Premium Backup ($49.95) to back up an unlimited Seagate GoFlex Home home network attached storagenumber of computers on the GoFlex Home network. You can upgrade at the Application Store that can be accessed through the Seagate Dashboard software.

For each user account set up on the GoFlex Home, three folders are created – a Public, Personal, and Backup folder. The Public folder holds files that can be stored and accessed by everyone on your home network. The Personal and Backup folders can only be accessed by the the user.

What I like about the sharing is the granular control available for the files shared. You can specify who you want to share files with, choose to share just certain files or entire folders, set passwords, and set expiry dates for the shares. Administration is intuitive and easy to pick up. You can send a URL of a shared file via email.

Stream media to other computers and media players on the network.

Stream media to other computers and media players on the home wireless network.


Music, photos and video can also be shared and streamed to media players, game consoles or network TVs that support UPnP-AV, DLNA or Windows Media Connect. A wide range of file types are supported.

The GoFlex Home is available in 1TB (S$179), 2TB (S$239) and 3TB (S$339) capacities.

CA and HyTrust ally to secure virtual and cloud infrastructure

Thursday, September 15th, 2011

Complementary technologies from these technology alliance partners promises to arm organisations with tools to virtualise with confidence.

CA Technologies is an IT management software and solutions company.CA Technologies and HyTrust, which provides solutions for policy management and access control for virtual infrastructure, has announced a collaboration to further improve security and compliance for customers leveraging virtualized systems and cloud infrastructures.

“Virtualization presents one of the most significant security challenges an IT organization faces, with the IT administrator being essentially given the ‘keys to the kingdom’ – access to every system and application. In the move to the cloud, the added complexity and multi-tenancy aspects of the infrastructure bring management, security, and compliance issues to the forefront,” said Eric Chiu, founder and president of HyTrust.

HyTrust Appliance complements CA Access Control by administering various aspects of a virtual infrastructure such as unified access control, policy enforcement and audit-quality logging.

HyTrust also supports the recently announced CA Automation Suite for Clouds by providing the security policy and compliance capabilities needed to improve security of the cloud infrastructure.

Large enterprises continue to explore the benefits of the cloud based on their experiences with virtualization, according to a December 2010 study conducted by Management Insight on behalf of CA Technologies.

This expansion moves them to a more complex infrastructure that demands more sophisticated and automated management and security.

CA ARCserve r16 unifies data protection for enterprise IT

Thursday, September 8th, 2011

CA Technologies today announced CA ARCserve r16, a comprehensive hybrid data protection solution that enables customers and service providers to rigorously safeguard the availability of critical data, applications and services across their increasingly diverse mix of virtual, conventional, and cloud resources.

CA Technologies is an IT management software and solutions company.The comprehensive solution and simplified licensing enable customers to reduce costs and better mitigate risk.

The CA ARCserve r16 unifies data protection across virtual, conventional and cloud resources to ease management of diverse IT Infrastructures.

CA ARCserve r16 delivers this high-value capability with:

  • A modular architecture that unifies diverse data management functions and facilitates integration with third-party management tools and services
  • A simplified single license based on total amount of data being protected
  • Standby replication of virtual machine images
  • A new cloud connection layer that eases management of access to multiple public and private cloud storage resources

It unifies data management functions through a scalable, modular architecture that also facilitates integration with third-party software such as remote monitoring tools, “Today’s IT organizations are spending inordinate time and money to protect critical services—often relying on a mix of ‘point’ backup solutions for conventional servers, virtual infrastructure and cloud resources that leave them exposed to the risk of a highly damaging outage,” James Forbes-May, Vice President of Data Management, APAC at CA Technologies.management platforms, and solutions from service providers, like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, N-able and LabTech.

CA ARCserve r16 further simplifies management of heterogeneous IT environments by allowing customers to purchase multiple data protection functionalities with a single license based on the total amount of data they need to protect.

This licensing model also makes it easy for service providers to price and package complete data protection and management solutions to their customers. CA ARCserve r16 is also available through traditional licensing models.

Comprehensive Protection for Virtualized Infrastructure

A new offering, CA ARCserve r16 Central Host-Based VM Backup, empowers organizations to protect their virtual infrastructure with image-based host-level protection for VMware vSphere, “Downtime is not an option in today’s highly competitive world, where businesses must be more agile than ever despite finite resources,” said Eric Rockwell, president of centrexIT, a San Diego-based provider of technology management services. “We’re migrating our customers from Symantec to CA ARCserve for a variety of reasons—including its overhead-slashing infinite incrementals functionality, its ready-to-go virtualization support, its reliability and its unbeatable replication capabilities.”as well as full system replication and high availability supporting Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer.

By providing both full bare-metal recovery and full system failover of complete VMs, it enables organizations to meet their increasingly stringent restore SLAs. Recovery of individual applications and granular recovery of targeted files and folders can be accomplished within minutes.

With the new CA ARCserve r16 Central Virtual Standby, customers can schedule the automatic conversion of image-based recovery points to VMware Virtual Disk or Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk formats. By making these backup images available as standby virtual machines, customers can further speed the recovery of data and services.

Powerful Support for the Cloud

CA ARCserve r16 introduces a common cloud connection layer across all data protection components— including traditional file backup, disk imaging, replication and high availability. “The banks that rely on our data protection services are subject to strict regulatory scrutiny,” said Terry Oehring, founder and CEO of Solis Security, an MSP specializing in providing information security for financial institutions. “By leveraging CA ARCserve, we can reliably and cost-effectively enable our customers to meet this key challenge by accurately targeting the data that they need to protect and securely replicating it offsite in the cloud.”This provides integrated access to hybrid cloud storage, enabling customers to more readily take advantage of public and private cloud services such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Windows Azure and Eucalyptus, for purposes such as remote, off-site data protection, archiving and failover.

CA ARCserve r16 also allows customers to use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) as their disaster recovery infrastructure helping to ensuring they can be up and running quickly in the event of a problem with their on-premises infrastructure. This cold standby technology can eliminate the significant costs associated with the purchase of redundant hardware and cloud computing charges as part of a business continuity plan.

CA ARCserve r16 also enables service providers and their customers to protect systems and data both locally (for fast, simple end-user or administrator recovery), and in the cloud (to protect critical data files offsite for disaster recovery).

Additional Enhancements across Entire Solution Set

“Since implementing CA ARCserve as the primary disaster recovery solution to help ensure the availability of key business systems in our highly virtualized environment, we’ve reduced our recovery time from more than three days to less than four hours,” said Prashanth Thirumlai, IT infrastructure manager at The Haskell Company, a $500 million integrated design-build firm based in Jacksonville, Florida. All major components of CA ARCserve r16—including ARCserve Backup, ARCserve D2D and ARCserve Replication and High Availability—have been updated with significant enhancements, including new AES encryption to secure data in transfer and at rest, as well as tighter integration between traditional and image-based backup.

In addition, CA ARCserve continues to offer integrated backup to disk, tape or cloud, storage resource management, infrastructure visualization and data deduplication.

Company byte: Akamai Technologies Inc

Tuesday, September 6th, 2011

Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM) provides cloud-based services for optimizing Web and mobile content and applications, online HD video, and secure e-commerce.

Combining highly-distributed, energy-efficient computing with intelligent software, Akamai’s global platform aims to transform the cloud into a more viable place to inform, entertain, advertise, transact and collaborate.

Akamai has deployed a pervasive, highly distributed cloud optimisation platform with nearly 100,000 servers located in more than 650 cities, in 72 countries and within many of the key networks that make up the internet.

With more than 2,100 employees, annual revenue in 2010 was $1,023.6 million, up 19 percent from the previous year. Follow postings related to Akamai Technologies on tech4tea.com.

Akamai’s product portfolio includes:

Digital Asset Solutions – to manage, store and deliver exceptional digital media experiences across a wide range of platforms/devices around the world. These include Akaimai HD Network, Akamai Media Delivery and Electronic Software Delivery.

Dynamic Site Solutions – to spped up rich interactive content and accelerate all customer-driven transactions. These include Dynamic Site Accelerator and Dynamic Site Accelerator Enterprise.

Application Performance Solutions – enables the public Internet to be the platform for accelerating any critical enterprise application to anyone, anytime, anywhere. Akamai is the leading global service provider for accelerating content and business processes online.These include Web Application Accelerator and IP Application Accelerator.

Advertising Decision Solutions – to enable more relevant online advertising, using Predictive Segments.

Akamai Launches Global NetAlliance Partner Program

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

The company helps systems integrators, application and infrastructure service providers, and technology partners to address the challenges of doing business in the cloud.

Information about the program and how to joinAkamai has announced its NetAlliance Partner Program for global IT solution providers. This program will help partners to integrate Akamai services into their offerings, and to pass the value of Akamai’s globally-distributed platform on to customers. With this program, Akamai is recruiting partners across platforms to help its customers leverage the Cloud for business success.

The Akamai NetAlliance partner program is designed to enable new members to:

“As the demands on today’s enterprise rapidly evolve, IT decision makers must find the optimal solutions for cloud computing, security, mobile strategies, and site and application performance,” said Brad Rinklin, vice president of Global Marketing & Alliances for Akamai.
  • Leverage integrated solutions with leaders in the public, private and hybrid-cloud markets
  • Add and scale revenue streams to their business with Akamai solutions that have a low barrier-to-entry
  • Help customers reduce costs and improve efficiencies in their datacenter consolidation by off-loading traffic to Akamai
  • Integrate a secure Internet platform to their cloud offerings by providing unmatched quality and performance
  • Increase global reach through Akamai’s global Internet platform
  • Access robust market development funds and Akamai training/certification programs
“Our focus on creating a diverse channel has allowed us to bring customers best-of-breed solutions for leveraging cloud business models without compromising security, reliability or performance. The Akamai NetAlliance Partner Program is about creating an eco-system of proven technology leaders in all regions of the world who are committed to advancing how business is conducted online,” Rinklin added.

Having built global alliances with IT leaders including HP, Jive Software, Rackspace® Hosting, Telefónica and Verizon, Akamai has also established partnerships with leading regional technology providers and integrators around the world to collaborate on solutions for today’s enterprise.

Some of those existing alliances across Asia Pacific Japan; Europe, Middle East and Africa; and South America, include 77 Agency, Arturai, Boreus, DMX Technologies Sdn. Bhd, Exceda, Kinmax Technology Inc., and Mikotek International Corporation, among others.

“2011 is a big year for extending Akamai’s channel as we made significant global investments to help our partners scale their business with our NetAlliance Partner Program,” said Martin Häring, vice president of International Marketing and Channels at Akamai.  “Our partners leverage Akamai’s innovative services to overcome inefficiencies inherent across the Internet. In collaboration with NetAlliance partners, Akamai is transforming the Internet into a reliable, high-performance platform for cloud services or any other Internet-based enterprise application.”