'Net Features : azure

State of Cloud Storage – Azure Ousts Amazon S3

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 18:15:00 GMT

So who’s the best cloud storage provider – Azure, Amazon, Google, HP, Rackspace?

Enterprise storage provider Nasuni released results from its latest State of Cloud Storage Report and found that Microsoft Windows Azure (Blob) Storage outperformed last year’s leader, Amazon S3. Surprised?

Nasuni tested the speed (write/read/delete), availability and scalability of the top five public cloud storage providers and found that Microsoft Azure surpassed Amazon in every single category that was examined.

Azure was 56 percent faster in write speed than Amazon, and 39 percent faster at reading files than HP in read speed. The average response time for Azure was 25 percent faster than Amazon S3. With Amazon cloud troubles over the past year, Web developers might ultimately find they’re using more Azure and less S3 in the future.

"Microsoft's investment in its second generation cloud storage, which it made available to customers last year, has clearly paid off," said Andres Rodriguez, CEO of Nasuni. "With Amazon S3 and Microsoft Windows Azure, the cloud storage industry clearly has two strong players to choose from. Even more encouraging, however, was the marked performance improvement across the board. As CSPs continue to mature, competition among top quality providers can only benefit enterprise IT."

Microsoft Brings Azure Cloud OS to China

Michael Garrity — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 18:38:00 GMT

China’s increasingly important role in the future of the Internet and Web hosting just got a major seal of approval from Microsoft, who recently announced that it was going to bring its Windows Azure cloud-based operating system to the Asian nation.

This launch, which follows the release of Windows Server 2012, will bring multi-tenant public and private cloud services to millions of the businesses that operate in the world’s most populous country, giving owners a choice in how (and when) they will move to the cloud. Thanks to both Server 2012 and Azure, Windows customers can find the cloud that best matches the needs of their businesses, from on-premises datacenters to a public cloud.

According to a report from Forrester Research, the public cloud market in China is set to grow from $297 million in 2011 to an astonishing $3.8 billion in 2020.

Microsoft has signed a memorandum of understanding with the municipality of Shanghai and inked a deal to license its technologies with the company 21Vianet, which will provide Windows Azure services from its local Chinese datacenters to provide the best performance for its customers in the country.

Social CMS in the Cloud: DotNetNuke Delivered in Azure

Administrator — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 15:15:00 GMT

DotNetNuke, a Web content management system for Microsoft .NET, recently announced an alliance with Microsoft to offer its Social CMS software through Microsoft's Windows Azure Cloud. DotNetNuke will also receive an investment from Microsoft to support engineering, sales and marketing.

By running DotNetNuke in the Azure cloud, users will be able to install and manage the software and hardware required to run the platform and will have access to the full feature set including site and document management, social collaboration, security, workflows, page and module caching, analytics and even mobile site management.

"Social experiences are ideal for cloud computing; they are consumed across many devices and browsers and they also need to scale based on fluctuations in usage," said Kim Akers, General Manager of Microsoft. "With Windows Azure developers can build social experiences that take advantage of a reliable cloud backend and a scalable way to manage and continually refine their sites. DotNetNuke's Windows Azure-based offering is designed to make it easy for organizations to build and deploy websites."

DotNetNuke began offering Windows Azure-based trials of its professional edition software worldwide, localized into five languages, earlier this year. The company today opened up registration for a beta version of its cloud offering that will be available in Q4 2012. DotNetNuke is scheduled to make the service generally available in early 2013, with service plans for mid-sized businesses and enterprises.

DotNetNuke began offering Windows Azure-based trials of its professional edition software worldwide earlier in 2012 but the company has now officially opened up registration for a beta version of the cloud offering that will be available in Q4 2012.

Windows Azure Comes to Web Hosts

Michael Garrity — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 19:00:00 GMT

Microsoft, once unquestionably the biggest name in technology, has fallen drastically behind the pack in most areas over the years. However, as of late the company has been making a major push to remain relevant, if not become a leader, in today’s hottest industries – not the least of which is cloud computing.

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced a new white-label-type version of its Windows Azure cloud platform for Web hosts using Windows Server.

The Service Management Portal (as it’s being called) will allow Microsoft’s hosting partners to provide their customers with an Azure-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) without having to tap into the Microsoft cloud. The service will use a standardized management portal, and will also come with extendable APIs. This will allow developers to connect their current hosted applications to their hosts’ other services, their own on-premises resources, or directly to Windows Azure.

At present, Microsoft is working on developing a collection of partnerships with various service providers, and has already named big time Web hosting and domain name company GoDaddy as the Service Management Portal’s pilot customer.

The service will also work with long-time Microsoft partner Apprenda; so, if Web hosts set up an Apprenda instance internally and plug it into the portal, their customers will be able to deploy their Web apps using the auto-scaling and other Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capabilities of Apprenda from within the Service Management Portal.

For now, the offering is in a beta-ish Community Technology Preview mode.

AWS Adds SSH Client, Drops Prices (Again)

Michael Garrity — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 20:30:00 GMT

At this point, it's pretty much common knowledge that Amazon Web Services (AWS), the e-commerce giant's cloud computing services provider, is going to make waves in the industry, and this last week really helped to reinforce that idea.

In terms of functionality, the company recently added an SSH client to the AWS console using MindTerm's Java-based SSH offering. The client will be available for Amazon EC2 users, and the announcement was packaged with news about a new instance type, the Medium (m1.medium), as well as the ability to launch 64-bit operating systems on the m1.small and c1.medium instances.

The new Medium instance type will come with 3.75 GB of RAM, a virtual core running at two ECU, 410 GB of instance storage, the ability to launch 32- and 64-bit operating systems and moderation I/O performance. In addition, the capability to run a 64-bit OS means users can create a single Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and run it on a wide range of instance types.

Including an SSH client makes it far easier for users (especially Windows users) to connect to an EC2 instance in just a couple of clicks.

Plus, less than a week ago the company dramatically slashed prices (for the 19th time since its inception) for EC2 instances, ElastiCache, Amazon Relational Dadabase Service and Amazon Elastic Map Reduce.

EC2 prices will drop by as much as 10 percent for on-demand services, while prices for Reserved Instances will by cut by 37 percent. Moreover, AWS is offering volume discounts of 10 percent for additional Reserved Instances for customers that already own over $250,000 worth. At $2 million it becomes a 20-percent discount.

Amazon's big announcements are already shaking up the market, as just a few days later Microsoft announced that it will be cutting pricing for its Azure Storage and Compute service.

Performance and the Cloud

Pete Prestipino — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 22:30:00 GMT

Who provides the fastest cloud service? According to CloudSlueth (a Compuware community), the honors go to Microsoft's Azure platform.

CloudSleuth uses the Gomex performance network to determine the reliability and consistency of popular public IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service) providers. CloudSleuth runs an identical sample ecommerce application on the popular cloud service providers and measures the results over at least six months of historical data.

Microsoft's Azure platform beat out Google App Engine, GoGrid, OpSource, RackSpace, Amazon, TekLinks, BitRefinery, CloudSigma and several others.

The report, available here, shows a significant difference between Azure servers running near Chicago and those running in Singapore.