1. File compression – This seems basic enough, but you can save tremendous amount of disk space, and in turn download bandwidth, simply by compressing your files. Try archive and compression like tar.bz2, tar.gz, or .rar.

2. P2P File Sharing – Peer-to-Peer file sharing is a great way to reduce load. Instead of every user downloading the file from you, all users share in the distribution of the file. BitTorrent has become particularly popular for use with large downloads.

3. File Hosting – There are many file-sharing sites that will allow you to host your files remotely and then share them with users. Many of these, however, limit download speeds for users who are not themselves subscribers.

4. Cloud Storage – If you know you are going to be send a large amount of data each month, you may consider using a cloud storage service, like Amazon S3. These are normally very inexpensive and will save you money over time.

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

Red Hat made the announcement this week in Boston at the Red Hat Summit, where they also announced new additions to the Red Hat Certified Cloud Partner Program, namely IBM, NTT Communications, and Savvis. Amazon Web Services was the first partner to join previously.

Red Hat was one of the first commercial Linux distributions that had a large following of desktop users. They gradually moved their business model to servers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and have since made the natural expansion into virtualization and cloud computing. Many of the servers that power websites and web hosting providers around the world use their software.

Source: ComputerWorld

The Amazon Cloud storage service has found a new way to solve the problem of slow upload times that could take weeks for some users uploading terabytes of data. It has taken a more traditional approach to solving the problem, allowing users to physically send their data on storage devices to be subsequently uploaded by Amazon itself with its high-speed network.

The upload service comes at a cost of $80 for shipment to one of the Seattle, Virginia or Dublin storage locations, and another $2.49 for each hour it takes to upload. The service comes at an additional cost to the usual Amazon Simple Storage Service fees. In light of this development, there are calls to allow cloud storage customers to put in place their own WAN acceleration device to upload data.

The service is called the AWS Import/Export service, and Amazon says: “AWS Import/Export accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport. AWS transfers your data directly onto and off of storage devices using Amazon’s high-speed internal network and bypassing the Internet. For significant data sets, AWS Import/Export is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity.”

Which means you basically book a courier job with FedEx. For more details or to use the Import/Export service, see the aws.amazon website.

Source | NetworkWorld and eWorldPost
Photo | Flickr

A very similar incident occurred in 2007 at a RackSpace data center. Regardless of this, Amazon needs to get its act together. Why didn’t the server load transfer over to the generators properly?

The cloud computing provider surely won’t be signing up very many new customers if these power outages continue. Finally, current EC2 users must be very upset about this and worried about Amazon’s long-term reliability.

The outages were caused by the failure of several electrical components as well as human error. Several disgruntled users report experiencing data loss as well.
While most EC2 users will unaffected by the power failures, this just goes to show that cloud computing isn’t perfectly reliable and there is still a lot of progress to be made in the field of distributed computing.

The two industry players are currently duking it out for control over the video-on-demand market. I find it very amusing that Netflix is now helping improve its rival’s profits. The savings as a result of the switch must be substantial, otherwise why would the DVD rental company make the switch?

Besides being less expensive, outsourcing hosting makes it easier for the company to focus on its other operations. The switch has already begun and will be completed in two years.

Photo | Flickr

Canonical, the company responsible for Ubuntu Linux, is offering a private cloud product called Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. This is something you can run on your own server and offer as an internal service. The projects website explains:

“Using Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, you can experience the benefits of cloud computing behind your firewall. Deploy workloads and have them running immediately. Grow or shrink computing capacity to meet the needs of your application.”

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud is available through Ubuntu Server Edition, and the website includes instructions for installation. Ubuntu was originally specifically for desktops, but they have been pushing their server edition for quite some time. It is still not clear exactly how many Ubuntu servers are connected to the Web.

Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons

AWS quickly bounced back from the attack and indicated that they had everything under control.

“At 7:45 p.m. Eastern Time we noticed an abnormal spike in queries and immediately identified it as a DDoS attack,” said Allen Goldberg, vice president of corporate communications at Neustar, in an e-mail.

“We had everything under control well under an hour. The attack was limited to Northern California Internet users,” he said.

One of the concerns raised about cloud computing, of which Amazon.com is a major provider, is whether it can be reliable to business customers who need their services to stay live as much as possible. Proponents would argue that companies like Amazon.com are better prepared for such strikes and are thus able to recover more quickly than the average business with its own internal web applications.

Source: Flickr
Photo: Flickr

Amazon’s solutions to this mass data transport problem has always been their Import/Export service. Essentially, a customer can ship data to their Amazon server through traditional mail service. The only problem was, until recently, the shipping was one-way. While it was called Import/Export, they only had the import half of it completed.

On their Friday blog post, Amazon Web Services announced that they now offer exporting of data from S3. You simply send them an email manifest and a storage device. They export the data to your device and send it back to you through the postal service for the price of $80 per storage device and $2.49 per hour. The service is currently only available in the US with European service expected in the future.

Source: The Register
Photo: Flickr

The Clothes.com website currently shows a “product smackdown” page featuring some of Zappos’ clothing. Although it is primarily a shoe store, it does currently offer some clothing. Amazon has long sold shoes and clothing, but most of their items were shipped from outside partners, unlike its in-house book operations.

As of today, their main website, Zappos.com still maintains its own branding with now immediately visible indication of its parent company. Visitors to Amazon.com can currently purchase shoes directly from the website without a third party, perhaps indicating that Zappos has already been integrated into their sales.

Source: Techcrunch