DuPont Fabrosが建設したVirgina州のデータセンタにFacebookが入居した、という記事。 

急激なユーザ数の増加によって、Facebookのデータセンタニーズが大きくなっている。 

Facebookは最近、毎月60万ユーザ増やしている。

アメリカのインターネットユーザの２４％がFacebookアカウントをもっている。  UKでは４３％

データセンタを運用するために毎月約＄１Mの費用を費やしている。

Facebookへ登録している写真は１００億枚に及ぶ.

 

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Facebook Expanding its Data Centers. Again

March 30th, 2009 : Rich Miller

Facebook has recently signed leases for additional data center space as it expands its infrastructure to support the social network's phenomenal growth. Facebook, which has just surpassed 200 million users, is also reportedly seeking up to $100 million for additional servers.

In recent weeks Facebook has reserved a large chunk of space in the huge ACC5 data center facilty being built in Ashburn, Virginia by DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT). Facebook is a tenant in DuPont Fabros' ACC4 data center in Ashburn, where it leases about 10,000 square feet of space to house its servers. The company's lease in ACC5 is at least double that size, and will use more than 6 megawatts of power.

DuPont Fabros announced the large lease at ACC5, but has not disclosed the tenant. However, other sources have named Facebook as the customer.  

Facebook has also signed a lease for additional data center space from Digital Realty Trust. The new lease, signed in the fourth quarter of last year, is the company's second with Digital Realty, the world's largest data center landlord. Back in February 2008, Facebook leased an entire data center facility in Santa Clara.

クラウドストレージ企業であるParaScale社が自社のソフトウェアをライセンスする事業を開始した。

ソフトウェアはParaScale Cloud Storage (PCS) Softwareと呼ばれ、既にSony Pictures ImageworksやStandford Genome Technology Centerが自社のPublic Storage Cloud サービス事業に利用している。 

価格はストレージの規模に対応して課金する方式で、約＄１．０５／GB。

 

Cloud StorageはAmazon S3、NetApp、Islion、EMCやSun Microsystems等の大手も参入している激戦市場。 

価格面以外での優位性を見せることが難しい市場だけにParaScaleの提供する機能の強化が大きな差別化要因となる。

 

 

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ParaScale, a Cloud Storage Company Opens For Business

ParaScale, a Cupertino, Calif.-based storage software company that debuted in June 2008, today announced the availability of its ParaScale Cloud Storage (PCS) software, which allows companies to turn commodity Linux servers into an Amazon S3-styled storage cloud. Sony Pictures Imageworks and Stanford Genome Technology Center are two companies currently using PCS. A handful of hosting companies such Carpathia Hosting are using ParaScale software to offer their own public storage clouds.

ParaScale's software release, while 6 months behind schedule, comes at a time when there is growing interest in private storage clouds at large companies. Big demand is yet to materialize, however. These private and low-cost storage clouds are likely to be used as a replacement for tape drives, which are used for backing up corporate data, much of which is never retrieved. Blue Coat Systems is using PCS for a cloud storage system for precisely that reason.

The company plans to charge for the software based on the size of the storage cloud. It will cost about $1.05 per gigabyte of storage. ParaScale competes with Amazon, NetApp, Islion, EMC and Sun Microsystems in what is generically referred to as the scalable network-attached storage business.

Amazon Web Serviceが新サービスとしてHadoopと呼ばれる頂戴規模データセットの検索、アクセスを高速に実現する技術をサービスとして提供する、と発表。 

 

HadoopはMapReduceと呼ばれるGoogleが開発したOpen Sourceをベースとしたコード。  Google自身はHadoopを使用しておらず、自社で独自の開発を行っている。 

 

価格はEC2とは別料金を設定。

 

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Amazon launches Hadoop data crunching service

Amazon on Thursday announced a new cloud computing service that uses Hadoop, a free software framework, to crunch tons of data. 

The service, called Amazon Elastic MapReduce, is designed for businesses, researchers and analysts trying to conduct data intensive number crunching (statement). Hadoop, which is used by companies like Google and Yahoo, is being pushed into the enterprise data center by startups like Cloudera. 

Clarification: Google invented and uses the MapReduce technology, but it doesn't use Hadoop, an open-source implementation of MapReduce. At least it doesn't use it broadly. It has its own in-house version.

Amazon's Hadoop framework runs on the company's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3). The general idea is that customers can use MapReduce to pay by the sip as they do things like index the web, data mine, conduct financial analysis, simulation and bioinformatics research. In a must read analysis, Dana Gardner reckons that Amazon's move could be a game changer for business intelligence. 

In a statement, Amazon said:

Amazon Elastic MapReduce creates data processing job flows that are executed by Hadoop software on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon EC2. The service automatically launches and configures the number and type of Amazon EC2 instances specified by customers. It then kicks off a Hadoop implementation of the MapReduce programming model, which loads large amounts of user input data from Amazon S3 and then subdivides it for parallel processing using Amazon EC2 instances. As processing completes, data is re-combined and reduced into a final solution, and the results deposited back into Amazon S3. Users can configure, manipulate, and monitor job flows through web service APIs or via the AWS Management Console.

That roughly translates to: Bring your data mining to us.

MapReduce is a separate service and here's the pricing in the U.S.:

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Experts Get Serious About Cloud Security

Derrick Harris | Tuesday, March 31, 2009 | 8:57 AM PT | 4 comments

In what could turn out to be a giant leap for cloud computing, a collection of cyber security experts from across the IT spectrum has launched the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). The group's stated mission is to promote best practices that ensure security in the cloud, and founding members include everyone from Jim Reavis, co-founder of Reavis Consulting Group, to David Cullinane, chief information security officer at eBay, and Alan Boehme, senior VP of IT strategy and architecture at ING.

I spoke with founding member Paul Kurtz, partner at Good Harbor Consulting, to get some details on the news — and I was a little surprised by what he had to say. While questions still remain in areas like data retrieval and identity management, Kurtz believes cloud computing is already secure enough to be used by large enterprises for mission-critical tasks. In fact, he thinks there are many security advantages to cloud computing. These include rapid software updates and upgrades, and, depending on the provider, multifactor authentication. It's the outsourcing of IT operations to a third party that makes execs "swallow hard," but he notes that even large banks already have run SAS 70 audits and assured themselves they can get what they need from the cloud.

With this in mind, the CSA exists not to make the cloud ready for the enterprise, but to make sure it remains usable. "The point is to think about security now, not after we've had a big event," he told me; you don't want to retrofit a fix. And given the "intense gravitational pull" of all things into the cloud, now is a timely moment to convene this consortium of practitioners. Thus far, Kurtz is not aware of any successful attacks on the cloud, but he points out that there's no harm in being ahead of the game.

Kurtz, who advised President Bush on critical infrastructure protection and looked at information security for the Obama transition team, says the cloud is even ready for the security requirements of the federal government. "The real question," he noted, "is whether the federal government is ready for cloud computing." For example, the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) was developed with client-server architectures in mind, and it still requires agency-by-agency accreditation for each individual vendor. This process becomes highly repetitive with the cloud model, though, where each agency would be testing the same system over and over again.

But change could be on the way. Kurtz says Vivek Kundra, administrator for e-government and IT for the Office of Management and Budget (essentially CIO for the federal government), is a big proponent of the cloud. (Check out this video of Obama's TIGR team, including Kundra in his previous role as CTO for the District of Columbia, touting cloud computing.) Several agencies already are considering how to leverage the cloud, and Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) CIO John Garing told me in October that he supports the formation of a single entity to provide computing services to all of the federal government. Such a sweeping change would have to come from the White House and Congress, he said, and that possibility seems a lot more likely with our pro-cloud executive branch.

Even before its official launch at the RSA Conference later this month, the CSA seems more legit than the "vapor tiger" Open Cloud Manifesto. As opposed to over-competitive vendors proposing — and quibbling over — non-binding, non-functional principles, the CSA comprises actual cloud users and security experts, and it already has 15 specific areas in which it plans to issue actual deliverables throughout the year. Such alliances already have borne fruit in web services and grid computing, so there's reason to have faith in the CSA.

15 Domains of Concern

• Information lifecycle management
• Governance and Enterprise Risk Management
• Compliance & Audit
• General Legal
• eDiscovery
• Encryption and Key Mgt
• Identity and Access Mgt
• Storage
• Virtualization
• Application Security
• Portability & Interoperability
• Data Center Operations Management
• Incident Response, Notification, Remediation
• "Traditional" Security impact (business continuity, disaster recovery, physical security)
• Architectural Framework

Microsoft社のAzureが２２時間ダウンしていた、という問題についてはあまり情報が開示されていない。 

Azureは同社のWashington州、Quincy市にある大型データセンタで稼動し、Dellのサーバが稼動しているとの事。

 

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22-Hour Outage for Windows Azure

March 16th, 2009 : Rich Miller

Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud platform was offline for 22 hours over the weekend. Windows Azure, which provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host web applications and services in Microsoft's data center, is currently in technology preview.  The incident began Friday night at about 10:30 pm Pacific time, and was resolved at 8:30 Saturday night.

Windows Azure is housed in Microsoft's huge data center in Quincy, Washington and runs on Dell servers. The pre-release technology preview and beta periods are useful for finding and fixing glitches, but also a time when developers are formulating opinions about the offering. Links via Cloud Security and Oakleaf Systems.

オープンsポー巣であるApache Web Serverが世界市場の６６％を占めている、という報告。

第2位のMicrosoft社に大きな差をつけての状況。 

 

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Apache Dominates on Busiest Web Sites

March 16th, 2009 : Rich Miller

The open source Apache web server is overwhelmingly the server of choice on the Internet's busiest sites, according to a new analysis from Netcraft. Apache is powering 66.6 percent of the top 1 million web sites, far ahead of Microsoft with 18.6 percent. Netcraft's list of the top sitesis based on web destinations visited by users its widely-distributed anti-phishing toolbar.

The data shows Apache with a much larger market share advantage than in the broader Netcraft survey of all 225 million web sites, where it holds a 46 percent share to Microsoft's 29 percent. "Examining a fixed number of high traffic sites produces a less volatile view which is uninfluenced by parked domains or the majority of personal sites, shared hosting accounts and blogs," Netcraft notes in its analysis. 

2008年にAmazonがRackable社から購入したサーバは＄８６Mを超えている、との記事。 

これは去年の＄５６Mを越える数字で、Amazonの急激な成長に伴うものである。  正確な収益は不明でも、現在S3(Simple Storage Service)で400億個のファイルを管理している、との報告がある。 

 

一方、Microsoft社は2007年に$126M も購入していながら、2008年はわずか$35Mしか購入していない。 Yahooも同様に急激に減っている。 

 

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Amazon: $86 Million in Servers in 2008

March 20th, 2009 : Rich Miller

Amazon bought more than $86 million in servers from Rackable Systems in 2008, surpassing Microsoft as the server maker's largest customer. The investment in data center hardware is likely tied to the growth of Amazon Web Services, the retailer's fast-growing cloud computing operation. Amazon (AMZN) doesn't break out any revenue data for its AWS operation, but recently noted that its S3 storage service now stores 40 billion objects, an increase of 11 billion from October and three times the volume from a year ago.   

Amazon spent $56 million on servers with Rackable in 2007, but boosted that to $86 million last year, as first noted at TechFlash. The growth of Amazon's business with Rackable has bucked a trend in which the vendor's other marquee customers, Microsoft and Yahoo, have reduced their spending.