“Big data represents a sea change of capabilities in IT” notes Matt McLarty, Vice President, Client Solutions at Layer 7, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. McLarty continued: “In conjunction with mobile and cloud, I think Big Data will provide a technological makeover to the typical enterprise infrastructure, drawing a hard API border in front of core business services while blurring the line between logic and data services.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Agree or...| By Maureen O'Gara | Article Rating: |
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| January 29, 2012 10:00 AM EST | Reads: |
1,597 |
Amazon's cloud, which, let's face it, is still pretty much developer turf, broadened its push into the enterprise Wednesday with the introduction of AWS Storage Gateway, a beta virtual appliance nominally meant to automate enterprise data backup to S3 while creating a comfort level with the cloud among the leery.
It's the first time Amazon has proposed putting its own software on the ground inside a corporate data center. And the stuff's targeted at large corporations. Amazon says some customers asked for such a solution. It also expects resellers to offer the service.
It is of course proprietary and a competitive problem for other cloud storage and gateway suppliers. Come to think of it, Amazon as repository of corporate data is a problem for a lot of people.

The Gateway - think of it as an EBS snapshot-taking umbilical cord - will make it easier to use Amazon S3 storage for disaster recovery, business continuity and data mitigation as well as low-latency backup and once a company's data is mirrored in the cloud - particularly since it'll probably be stored there as EBS volumes - well, users will be tempted to experiment with other AWS services like EC2. Might as well, the data's already there.
You see where this is going, right?
As Amazon put it in its official announcement, "The AWS Storage Gateway also makes it easy to leverage the on-demand compute capacity of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for additional capacity during peak periods, for new projects, or as a more cost-effective way to run normal enterprise workloads."
Cloud backup of course promises the inevitable, tantalizing reduction in on-premise hardware, manpower and fears of tapes getting lost in transit.
The Gateway only needs commodity hardware and works with exiting DAS and SANs and applications. Amazon promises the data will be transported and stored securely using the industry standards required by banks and healthcare.
No applications have to be re-architected to accommodate the Gateway. It uses a standard iSCSI interface, transfers data to S3 over SSL, and AES encrypts it when it gets there. Then it makes it redundant.
Amazon is offering a 60-day free trial after which the service will run $125 a month for each Gateway, with storage set at 14 cents a gigabyte a month.
Each Gateway can handle up to 12TB of storage across 12 volumes. Fear not, accounts can have multiple gateways.
The service is available from Amazon data centers in the US, Ireland, Singapore and Tokyo.
The widgetry is still a beta and relatively rudimentary. Initially - and non-threateningly - all the data will be kept on the appliance - and on-premise - while it's backed up in the cloud - so-called Gateway-Stored volumes.
Gateway-Cached volumes, where the only full copy of the data is in the cloud, and the data in the appliance is only what's frequently accessed, won't be available for a few months. There's no deduplication or WAN optimization yet either although Amazon likely has plans.
Amazon said the first release of the Gateway takes the form of a VM image for VMware ESXi 4.1, with plans to support other virtual environments in the future. It currently supports mounting of its iSCSI storage volumes using Windows and Red Hat iSCSI Initiators.
Here's how Amazon sees the pieces fitting together:

Published January 29, 2012 Reads 1,597
Copyright © 2012 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.
More Stories By Maureen O'Gara
Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025. Twitter: @MaureenOGara
“Big data represents a sea change of capabilities in IT” notes Matt McLarty, Vice President, Client Solutions at Layer 7, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. McLarty continued: “In conjunction with mobile and cloud, I think Big Data will provide a technological makeover to the typical enterprise infrastructure, drawing a hard API border in front of core business services while blurring the line between logic and data services.”
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As more enterprises are adopting clouds, the nature of cloud computing is changing. Previously, clouds were used to test applications or for non-mission critical applications. Today, enterprises are using clouds for cost-saving advantages and launching more mission critical applications that have defined performance needs.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It wou...
Virtualization and private cloud are good for server consolidation, creating flexible environments, and saving IT budget dollars. A recent survey of 1200 companies with 500+ employees showed that 59% had server virtualization in production or pilot. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dave Asprey, VP of Cloud Security at Trend Micro, will explain the types of situations when you should consider not virtualizing some of your applications. ...
Hardware and chemistry improvements will make the $1,000 human genome a reality soon. While the massive amount of genomics data that will be generated represents a huge opportunity to advance personal medicine, it also presents an enormous big data challenge.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dr Andreas Sundquist, CEO of DNAnexus, will discuss how the cloud will address these issues by enabling the management, storage, sharing and analysis of the world’s DNA data and how it ...
The Platform as a Service (PaaS) market grew out of the fact that no other cloud solution addressed the ever-increasing complexity of managing and writing modern applications: no frameworks, libraries or APIs alone could tackle the sticky application engineering challenges. Unfortunately, PaaS 1.0 is what people are now seeing as strictly a “tool” to easily deploy apps to the infrastructure in a self-service way with little or no differentiation among offerings. However, in order for PaaS to rea...
Hadoop, MapReduce, Hive, Hbase, Lucene, Solr? The only thing growing faster than enterprise data these days is the landscape of big data tools. These tools, which are designed to help organizations turn big data into opportunities, are gaining deeper insight into massive volumes of information. A recent Gartner report predicts that enterprise data will increase by 650% over the next five years, which means that the time is now for IT decision makers to determine which big data tools are the best...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...
Building a cloud computing environment with on-demand access to compute, network, and storage resources requires an elastic infrastructure at multiple levels. Virtualization combined with x86 servers has transformed the way we scale out compute resources. Unfortunately, legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage architectures are rooted in rigid mainframe-era designs, and are fundamentally mismatched with the dynamic, shared modern data center.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, ...
The proliferation of device connectivity is redefining the functionality requirements and capabilities of many embedded systems as more and more of these devices look to leverage the “Cloud.” While many commercial software and hardware component vendors have begun to realign their value propositions to satisfy growing demand, commercial-off-the-shelf products (COTS) alone cannot meet every OEM’s needs. As a result, the Embedded Cloud has injected a new level of uncertainty and a new competitive ...
While the notion of Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) may seem a bit far-fetched, Shadow IT, where users essentially bring unauthorized cloud services into business environments, has become an increasing corporate concern as highlighted in a recent CFO.com article. The risk of Shadow IT is that it comprom...
What happens when technology converges? When old meets new?
A fine example of what might happen is what has happened in the carrier space as voice and data services increasingly meet on the same network, each carrying unique characteristics forward from the older technology from which they sprung. ...
For many of the same reasons IPv6 migration is moving slower than perhaps it should given the urgent need for more IP addresses (to support all those cows connecting to the Internet) is the sheer magnitude of such an effort. Without the ability for IPv6-only nodes to talk to IPv4-only nodes, there’s...
The trade off between security and performance has long been a known issue across IT organizations. One of the first things to go when performance is unacceptable is a security solution. This isn’t just an IT phenomenon either; consider how many of us have disabled endpoint security solutions like a...
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Why? Because of platform proliferation. Because of quick technology obsolescence. (See this)
Management perception compounds the problem.
Anybody, not intimately familiar with this...
We’re starting a new series of articles here called ‘Cloud Leaders of Tomorrow‘ – The objective of which is to showcase the movers and shakers of the Canadian Cloud industry.
Our first profile is Kevin Crowe, Director Cloud Services for Long View, and this is a perfect start because within our over...
Hybrid tools try to resolve the debate of … “Should you write a mobile web application which will render on multiple platforms without significant change but won’t be able to take advantage on native features?” Or “Should you create platform specific native application to fully utilize the power of ...
Is Big Data destined for only the top 3,000 companies worldwide? What about medium or small companies who are equally as data-driven? Is there a place for Big Data in SMB markets? When I talk to SMB companies about their use of public cloud services, it’s a no-brainer. Pay as you go, lower costs up...
What’s actually in a Cloud SLA, or what should be in such an agreement, is all over the map. Ask the public IaaS providers, and they’ll give you one answer. Ask SaaS or PaaS providers, and they’ll tell you something different. And what about private Clouds? SLAs take on an entirely new meaning there...








