Cloud storage provider Salesforce has begun to tout the cloud as an energy efficient place to store a company’s data. The firm’s energy efficiency flaunting proves that going green has quickly become good PR for businesses.

In its recent sustainability report, the Marc Benioff led company heralds the cloud as producing 95 percent less carbon emissions than on-premise servers. Even more surprising, Salesforce says its cloud is 64 percent more energy efficient than the average company’s private cloud.

Following the release of the sustainability report, the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace came out and said, “Good going Salesforce”. The news shows that not only are cloud solutions proving to be an eco-friendly storage option; they are also showing the publicity boon one gains by going green.

As the debate over climate change quickly moves from discussion to fact, the world is becoming evermore aware of things like a carbon footprint. World governments are starting to focus on ways to push out excessive energy expenditures and consumers are starting to make purchase decisions with emissions in mind.

Last year, Apple gushed about its solar powered datacentre. Even the EU reported they cut £1.3m in expenditures by going green last July.

The other side of the “green advantage” comes when companies like Microsoft don’t push to go green. If you’re a firm that refuses to develop its green options you should expect a ton of criticism from the likes of the aforementioned Greenpeace.

So by going green not only have firm’s like Salesforce helped the environment, they’ve also helped themselves.

By way of free advertising from Greenpeace Salesforce just pointed out its better for the environment than Skydrive and Google Drive without ever making the comparison. That type of endorsement is a big deal in the mind of the consumer. In this ever increasing world of technological parity getting a leg up through good deeds is no small feat.

Consumers want to know they are doing their part for the environment. By investing in a pro-green firm like Salesforce they are saying, “Hey, we are doing our part”. So as the world becomes more green focused so should technology companies. If not for the environment, than at least do it for the publicity.

05 Mar 2013

Amazon has announced that it has reduced pricing for Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) reserved instances running Linux/Unix, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and Rat Hat Enterprise Linux.

Price reductions will apply to standard, second-generation standard, high-memory, and high-CPU instance families. User’s eligible for the price cuts can receive discounts of up to 27 percent. The price reductions mark the 26th time that Amazon has lowered prices on its EC2 service since 2008.

Cuts will be most prevalent for high-CPU instances. Amazon reports that it will cut high-CPU instances prices by over 27 percent in Europe. Across the board, users running operations in Europe should expect some of the highest levels of discounts.

Price cuts will only apply to Linux-based users. Those currently using EC2 on Windows-based systems are not eligible for the price cuts at this time.

The price drops mark another in a string of discounts by Amazon for the EC2 platform. Amazon’s businesses model to reduce prices comes from its philosophy to focus on a wide user base instead of high margins.

All of Amazon’s products and services focus on offering low margins to gain the highest number of converts. During a presentation last November, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos highlighted the firms push to offer products at low margins while selling at high volumes.

In an effort to keep up with Amazon’s price cuts, Microsoft announced its own discounts on the Azure storage cloud last December. Microsoft lowered prices on its platform by as much as 28 percent.

Amazon’s EC2 solution is a hosted cloud system used to run server deployments in the ether. The offering was launched in late 2008. EC2 is currently used by firms such as Instagram and Netflix.

The cloud solution was left in a jam last Christmas when operations went offline. On Christmas Eve, EC2 systems went down following a human error caused by an Amazon employee.

The growth in cloud-based storage services is dialing back the need for more on-board storage in mobile devices.

Researchers with analyst firm IHS said that over the last year, the growth in the average amount of on-board memory in smartphones has actually declined over 2012 levels as vendors appear to have at least temporarily reached a “sweet spot” for handset storage.

Analysts believe that as cloud storage and backup services are becoming more popular, users are seeing less of a need to keep large data archives on their devices. As such, what was a three-fold increase in handset storage between 2011 and 2012 shrank from and average of 13.2GB per device to 12.8GB in 2013.

Handsets are not the only mobile sector to have hit a growth plateau. Researchers found that tablet manufacturers experienced an even bigger dip in storage demand. Over the course of the year, IHS teardown reports found that on average tablet vendors used 25 per cent less storage as average capacity fell from 32.1GB to 24GB.

While the report is good news for cloud service providers and mobile device vendors who are looking to keep costs down, the dip could also spell disaster for one corner of the semiconductor industry. With slowing demand for the NAND memory chips used in mobile storage, some memory vendors could see their bottom lines take a big hit.

“Mobile device brands increasingly are offering their own application ecosystems and online storage benefits that perform the same functions as onboard NAND flash,” said IHS memory and storage analyst Ryan Chien,

“With mobile platforms a leading growth driver for the NAND industry, this trend represents a major cause of concern for flash memory makers.”

Salesforce’s 2012 Sustainability Report is been heralded by environmental groups as a “high water mark” for the cloud storage industry.

According to the report, Salesforce has been able to increase its workflow while reducing emissions. The cloud storage provider says that it has lowered its emissions through a mixture of improved technology and green alternatives.

Salesforce reports that it was able to reduce its carbon emissions per cloud transaction by 20 percent in 2012. The company says it was able to do this while increasing overall transactions by 63 percent.

Among the cuts the firm made to go green included a switch to bio-diesel employee buses and an increase in video conferencing. In its report, Salesforce says that it has invested in video conferencing technology in an effort to circumvent excessive employee business travel.

While the company has made strides to go green it still expects to do more in the coming year. Salesforce’s goals for 2013 include encouraging energy suppliers to invest in renewable energy and researching future green technologies for the datacentre.

“I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished, but we have much more to do. As always, we believe in the power of sharing the model,” said Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff.

“It is my hope that this report goes beyond detailing what we are doing at Salesforce, and inspires others to work toward a sustainable world.”

Greenpeace has heralded Salesforce’s green outlook as a wake up call to the cloud storage industry. According to the group’s senior IT analyst Gary Cook, the early commitment by Salesforce to get greener should result in a net positive for the industry as a whole.

“Salesforce’s commitment sends an important signal to the rest of the sector that energy efficiency is important, but not enough. Salesforce and other leading IT companies recognize that they must shift their explosive growth in electricity demand to renewable sources of electricity,” said Cook.

“The transformation of Salesforce’s cloud to renewable electricity will not happen overnight, but the commitment and initial steps in its announcement show that the company intends to play a leading role in shaping a truly green cloud.”

This is not the first time Greenpeace has spoke up on the issue of energy consumption in the datacentre. Last year, Greenpeace slammed Microsoft and Apple for building datacentres in regions which rely heavily on coal power.

Wireless LAN (WLAN) management vendor Aerohive has unveiled a trio of products designed to expand its WAN and on-premise networking lines.

The company said that the SR series switches would offer improved connectivity speeds and options for both headquarter and branch office locations, while the HiveManager and HiveOS 6.0 releases would give administrators improved tools for monitoring and managing traffic on their wireless network infrastructure.

“Managing the surge in enterprise mobility has become the primary concern for organisations evaluating how their users connect to the corporate network,” said Aerohive chief executive David Flynn.

“Our new SR series switches along with our APs, branch routers and cloud management allow our customers to build an access layer solution that is optimised for the mobile centric enterprises.”

The SR switches, which are set to arrive in March, will offer both 3G and 4G wireless networking capability along with eight, 24 and 48 port LAN connectivity. The switches will include tools to manage both VoIP and data traffic over networks.

Meanwhile, the HiveOS and Hive Manager will be updated to improve network visibility and management. The company said the HiveOS update would add traffic management and security components to scale up to 1,000 network applications on both LAN and wireless networks.

The company believes its ability to manage and monitor traffic over wireless networking will help to set both products apart in a changing IT sector.

With consumerisation bringing an increased reliance on wireless devices, Aerohive sees its products playing a vital role in helping companies manage large-scale networks and WAN deployments, the firm said.

IBM said that it would be transitioning all of its enterprise cloud computing software and service lines to open platforms.

The company said that it would be offering a full range of cloud platforms which would be based on the OpenStack model and would better enable companies to customise and build their own cloud computing deployments.

The rollout will be lead with the release of the SmartCloud Orchestrator tool. The management platform will allow businesses and developers to synch components from multiple cloud services into a single offering.

IBM hopes that the tool will speed up the time needed to construct new cloud platforms by providing developers with a simplified method for constructing the interfaces for cloud computing services

The release is the first in what IBM promises will be a larger line of cloud computing products and services which will be based on open source technology platforms. Big Blue hopes that its efforts will mimic the success of other open platforms in the enterprise space.

“Just as standards and open source revolutionized the Web and Linux, they will also have a tremendous impact on cloud computing. IBM has been at the forefront of championing standards and open source for years, and we are doing it again for cloud computing,” said IBM senior vice president of software Robert LeBlanc.

“The winner here will be customers, who will not find themselves locked into any one vendor, but be free to choose the best platform based on the best set of capabilities that meet their needs.”

The release also marks a new episode in IBM’s cloud computing efforts. The company in recent weeks unveiled a promising new 100Gbit/s interconnect platform which could expand the potential market for high-performance cloud computing platforms.

Dropbox chief executive Drew Houston has called out the iCloud’s walled garden as bad for business.

According to Houston, its poor form to have a cloud storage solution that only works for one type of hardware maker. He specifically questions why an end user would want to use a cloud platform that’s proprietary.

“There will never be an engineer in the Apple cafeteria who’s like, hey I made the Android version of iCloud,” Houston said, according to MacWorld.

Houston goes on to say that it might not be in a hardware maker’s best interest to operate a cloud storage offering. He believes that the work involved in protecting and managing a cloud storage operation might be too much for some firms.

A possible solution for the issue, according to Houston, may be partnering up with cloud operators to bring storage apps baked into devices. He specifically points to a recent deal Dropbox signed with Samsung to have Dropbox’s app pre-installed on all Samsung devices.

On one hand, Houston has a point. Being unable to access files stored in the iCloud on a Surface Tablet could be problematic. However, with so many companies, and people, living an i-only life it’s probably safe to assume the issue is a moot point in a variety of cases.

More importantly, if you’re Apple, you’re just better off having a consumer using only your devices and services. If a consumer has already bought into your whole ecosystem than you really don’t have to worry about them moving somewhere else.

05 Mar 2013

Cloud storage provider Box pushes back on roughly 90 percent of the governmental requests for data it receives, according to Box general council Peter McGoff.

McGoff says the firm works with law enforcement officials and scans through court orders for loopholes in an attempt to protect user data. He says that data stored in the cloud stands up to the same rules that dictate protocol in the on-site storage sector.

“In my time at Box we have pushed back on roughly 90 percent of court orders,” said McGoff during a recent panel on Cloud data regulations.

McGoff says that Box feels constant pressure to fight on the behalf of its user’s privacy. He reported during his presentation that putting the customer first and keeping government snoops away from consumer data is a constant battle.

“You’ve got customer who entrust their most sensitive data to Box. You got an agreement with the company to not share that information with anybody. But on the other side of that you have governments wanting to see that data,” continued McGoff.

“We have constant pressure between living up to consumer expectations and dealing with government access.”

According to McGoff, the ability to keep sensitive data outside of the hands of government officials is no different in the cloud or on-site. He believes that the biggest myths about what rights a consumer who stores data in the cloud have are mostly perpetuated by on-site storage firms.

“The US on premise hardware and software providers help perpetuate this myth of what the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) can do,” continued McGoff.

Fellow panelist Francoise Gilbert tended to agree with McGoff’s assessment. The managing attorney at the IT Law Group said during the presentation that the Patriot Act shouldn’t be considered a threat to big businesses.

“Don’t blame the Patriot Act, it has very little to do with all of this it. It’s just one of the many laws that deals with this matter.” said fellow panelist Gilbert.

Gilbert stated that even with the Patriot Act, requests for the public’s data must go through the courts. She says that the time and expensive involved with obtaining that data is, in many cases, too much for the government to handle.

“The concept that the government knocks on the door and just asks for things is not true,”

Box’s panel comes following a busy month for corporate transparency. Both Google and Twitter released transparency reports on governmental requests for data earlier this year.

Microsoft has launched new versions of its cloud-based software as a service (Saas) Office 365 suite for businesses, bringing an updated licensing model, greater focus on worker mobility via the cloud, and expanded integration with its enterprise social networking tool Yammer.

Unveiled today, the new Office 365 for businesses adds two further offerings, Office 365 Midsize Business and Office 365 Small Business Premium, to address some of the needs customers have been asking for, Microsoft said. The existing Office 365 Enterprise release has also been updated.

“There are three main areas we’ve invested in with the new Office. Firstly, we’ve looked at how Office is used across PC, tablet and phone, and making sure users have the right experience for how they want to be productive on those devices. The second area is around cloud, and the third is social, building on our acquisition of Yammer,” Lara Kingwell, Microsoft UK Office launch lead manager, told V3.

Like the consumer-focused Office 365 Home Premium that shipped last month, the business versions are licensed on a per-user subscription basis, allowing each user access from up to five devices, including Windows tablets, PCs or Macs.

Users also get the rights to stream the desktop Office apps onto any internet-connected PC they might be sitting at via Microsoft’s Click-to-Run feature, a move designed to make it easy for users to get the tools they need to do their job wherever they might be.

Served up this way, the desktop Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and OneNote are known as Office 365 ProPlus, and use Microsoft’s app virtualisation (App-V) technology for deployment rather than a conventional installation.

Office 365 ProPlus is available as a standalone offering for £10.10 per user per month.

Meanwhile, Office 365 Small Business Premium targets small firms with one to 10 users and has a simple setup process that requires no IT skills, according to Microsoft.

It provides email, communication and collaboration capabilities via cloud-hosted versions of Exchange, Lync and SharePoint and is priced at £10.10 per user per month.

Rackspace has acquired database firm ObjectRocket to add its NoSQL database-as-a-service (DBaaS) platform to its ever-growing portfolio of cloud computing offerings.

The move will help customers to implement a big data strategy, according to Rackspace, as well as helping to differentiate its offerings from other cloud providers.

With the acquisition expected to close Wednesday, Rackspace said it intends to move quickly to integrate ObjectRocket’s technology with its OpenStack-based open cloud platform in order to make the service available to its customers.

It is set to be up and running from Rackspace’s Chicago datacentre in March, and will roll out to the firm’s other global datacentres throughout the rest of the year.

European datacentre support is expected “sooner rather than later,” Rackspace vice president of technology Nigel Beighton told V3.

ObjectRocket’s platform is based on the MongoDB open-source database, which does not rely on traditional relational database techniques to store and retrieve information, making it a “NoSQL” class of tool.

“Companies are starting to realise that they shouldn’t throw any data away, and instead of worrying about the cost of very expensive proprietary systems, they are now looking at NoSQL and open-source technologies as a very cost-effective way of handling all the data they will ever have,” said Beighton, explaining Rackspace’s reasons for the acquisition.

ObjectRocket built its service from the outset to be able to partition – or “shard” – the database across multiple servers, enabling it to scale easily, while also adding greater resilience and recovery capabilities.

For this reason, it is expected to attract existing MongoDB users who are looking for a way to scale up, or those taking their first steps in the NoSQL world and don’t want to have to build it all themselves.

“If I was creating an e-commerce solution now, I’d really think about using NoSQL for driving the catalogue, for giving a really fast user experience when searching for products, while a relational database would be best for recording purchase transactions,” Beighton said.

Rackspace said that the ObjectRocket service will store data entirely on Solid State Drives (SSDs), with redundancy built-in, and that in tests it delivered a latency of just 2ms, making it 10 times faster than rival database services.

The new platform will also be backed by Rackspace’s Fanatical Support services.

Rackspace has yet to disclose pricing, but Beighton said it would likely be in line with ObjectRocket’s existing licensing structure, which starts at $29 per month for a 1GB shard.

No financial details on the deal were disclosed.