Category: Network news

Aruba Networks will announce this week an enterprise-class mobile access point that will put users at the edge of their corporate network no matter where they are located. When it becomes available, the hardware-software solution will set up a tunnel across the Internet to the Aruba Centralized Mobility Controller sitting behind a corporate firewall. It will also include a choice of two access points — a portable model, AP-65, measuring three-by-three inches; and model AP-41, designed for home office. “It is as if the enterprise wireless went with them. It pops up as a corporate hot spot wherever you plug into,” said the Aruba Networks founder Keerti Melkote. The solution would look the same to end-users as a VPN for data. However, the solution is more manageable than a VPN because it includes an access point, according to Craig Mathias, principal with the Farpoint Group. “It is, in effect, an enterprise-class product controlled by the enterprise switch,” Mathias said. Beyond data, the Aruba architecture will allow corporate users of VOIP systems to take their office phone number with them. By plugging in the access point to an Ethernet connection a mobile worker can use a wireless, IEEE 802.11x handset, and have his own phone number wherever and whenever he plugs in, noted Melkote. AP 65, for the mobile office is priced at US$495. Model AP 41, optimized for home/office, is priced at $195,

A jury has found that Google infringed Oracle’s Java copyrights in Android however couldn’t decide unanimously if the the infringement was protected by “fair use.”

The jury’s verdict, delivered Monday once per week of deliberation, may be a partial victory for Oracle in its lawsuit against Google, however Oracle can have to be compelled to wait longer — presumably for a retrial — to check whether or not Google can escape liability with its claim of truthful use. Continue reading “Google infringed Java copyrights in Android, jury finds”

If you are looking to do real-time monitoring of your server processes in addition to seeing the overall conditions of your Windows, Linux and Mac OS servers, then take a look at the new v3 of Reveal Cloud that was announced today by CopperEgg. We last covered them in July here. CopperEgg has hundreds of RevealCloud customers who are actively monitoring thousands of servers around the world.

The new version can provide more insight into what is going on inside your servers, as you can see in the screenshot above. For example, you can find out what processes are consuming abnormal amounts of memory or CPU cycles. RevealCloud can handle physical, virtual, and cloud systems. The monitoring is all browser-based, and CopperEgg provides full functionality for up to two servers to try it out, with paid versions for more servers.

This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. Read the case study about how Intel Xeon processors and VMware helped virtualize 12 business critical database applications.

Add Basho to the companies looking to take a chunk of the cloud storage space. Today, the company announced RiakCS, a “multi-tenant, distributed, S3-compatible cloud storage platform” that runs on top of the Riak-distributed database. The question isn’t really whether Basho can cut into Amazon’s business, but how much.

According to J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth, Amazon Web Services overall is expected to be a $2.6 billion business by 2015. S3 is a pretty big chunk of that.

We’ve noted previously that Amazon S3 is seeing staggering growth. According to stats from January, Amazon had 762 billion objects stored in S3. That’s a year-over-year growth of 192%, says AWS evangelist Jeff Barr.

RiakCS Versus Amazon S3
Is RiakCS competitive with Amazon S3? I guess that depends on your criteria. The feature-set for RiakCS looks competitive. According to the “Building Your Storage Cloud,” (PDF) white paper from Basho, RiakCS looks like a robust and S3-compatible system.

The company is targeting service providers that might want to offer S3-compatible storage or Dropbox-like services, and companies that might want to host their own S3-compatible storage.

Note that the Basho white paper is inaccurate in at least one regard. The paper claims that Amazon offers “no guarantee of service – Amazon does not provide or offer a service level agreement to customers.” Actually, Amazon does provide an S3 SLA, which promises “commercially reasonable efforts to make Amazon S3 available with a Monthly Uptime Percentage (defined below) of at least 99.9% during any monthly billing cycle.” If S3 is unavailable for some reason, customers can get a 10% credit for uptime less than 99.9% but more than 99%. They can receive a 25% credit for less than 99%.

It may not be a very good SLA, but it’s an SLA.

There’s at least one feature discrepancy between S3 and RiakCS, in terms of supported object size. RiakCS has a 5GB limit on object size, whereas Amazon S3 has a 5TB limit. Note that Amazon’s object-size limit was 5GB until December of 2010, and was raised in part to cope with use cases like storing uncompressed movie files.

Pricing should be to Basho’s advantage, kind of, for large-scale storage problems. When I asked Basho about its pricing, I was told that prices start at $10,000 per storage server. Assuming a 24TB server, they say, you should be looking at about $0.40 per GB total for the cost of RiakCS alone.

Amazon, on the other hand, starts at $0.093/GB per month for reduced redundancy storage or $0.125/GB per month for regular S3. Amazon’s simple monthly calculator says that 24TB of storage will run about $2,718 a month, which means you’d pay off the licensing fees in less than four months.

On the other hand, the $0.40/GB cost that is projected by Basho doesn’t take into account any hardware, energy or personnel costs.

RiakCS isn’t the only game in town, of course. Eucalyptus Walrus provides an S3-compatible storage layer that companies could build on without any costs, though it doesn’t seem to be quite as full-featured as RiakCS – particularly when it comes to the reporting/accounting features for RiakCS.

If you’re looking at alternatives to Amazon S3, what features are most important? Is it enough for a company to offer a solid on-premises solution, or is there something that would make a cloud-storage offering the category killer?