Amazon Web Services Positions Itself as the Infrastructure of Innovation

Amazon Web Services is growing rapidly thanks to a virtuous circle -- as it gains more customers there is greater server usage, this means AWS needs to build more infrastructure, which then leads to greater economies of scale, the company benefits from lower infrastructure costs, it reduces prices and this attracts even more customers.  This virtuous cycle is currently in full motion, giving AWS a strategic advantage over others who were late to enter the market, said Andy Jassy in a keynote at the company's first AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.  The company has lowered prices 23 times since launching cloud services in 2006 largely without competitive pressure to do so. The latest price cut: AWS is lowering its S3 cloud storage service by 25%.

Jassy said Amazon is injecting new energy into its virtuous circle flywheel by adding services/features and opening up to third party integrators, network solution providers and app vendors.  This propels AWS forward to be the "infrastructure for innovation."

Here is current snapshot of AWS

• 100s of thousands of customers using its cloud services
• Over 300 government agencies and 1,500 academic institutions
• AWS has introduced over 150 new cloud services or features during 2012
• Amazon's S3 storage service is currently holding over 1.3 trillion objects and handling peak loads of 835,000 requests per second
• The Amazon Elastic Map Reduce service (Hadoop running on EC2) has now launched 3.7 million clusters
• In 2003, Amazon.com's retail business generated $5.2 billion in revenue. Now, AWS adds enough server capacity every day to power the entire operations of the 2003 retail business
• AWS Global Infrastructure now encompasses 9 regions(US East, two US West coast, Europre, Brazil, Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney) 25 availability zones and 38 edge locations. There is as a separate U.S. government AWS cloud

Jassy's keynote, along with partner presentations from NASA, Netflix, NASDAQ and SAP, is now on YouTube.

http://youtu.be/8FJ5DBLSFe4
http://aws.amazon.com/live/

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Amazon's Redshift Brings Data Analysis and Warehousing to Cloud

Amazon Web Services introduced Redshift, a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud.

Amazon Redshift, which works with third-party business intelligence tools, allow enterprises to leverage the scale of the cloud to aggregate and analyze large data sets.  Redshift offers fast query performance using SQL-based analysis tools.

Using the AWS Management Console, businesess can quickly launch a Redshift cluster, starting with a few hundred gigabytes of data and scaling to a petabyte or more. Redshift manages all the work needed to set up, operate, and scale a data warehouse cluster, from provisioning capacity to monitoring and backing up the cluster, to applying patches and upgrades.

AWS said pricing will be under$1,000 per terabyte per year, which the company estimates is about 1/10th the cost of traditional data warehouse solutions. Query performance is said to be 10X faster than an "old guard" data warehouse provider.

The keynote presentation by AWS Sr. Vice President Andy Jassy is posted online.

http://aws.amazon.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FJ5DBLSFe4&feature=youtu.be

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F5 Intros Virtual Big-IP ADC in the Amazon Cloud

F5 Networks introduced a BIG-IP virtual edition for the AWS cloud, enabling enterprises to extend their data center and applications to AWS while assuring enterprise-class reliability, scale, security, and performance.

The BIG-IP application delivery controller (ADC) for AWS offers equivalent features to physical BIG-IP devices.  These include options for traffic management, global server load balancing, application firewall, web application acceleration, and other advanced application delivery functions. 

F5 said that with BIG-IP running in enterprise data centers and on AWS, customers can establish secure tunnels, burst to the cloud, and control the application from end to end.

 

F5’s initial product offering will use the AWS “bring your own license” (BYOL) model, which allows customers to buy perpetual licenses from F5 and then apply these licenses to instances running in AWS.

F5 already provides support for virtualized and cloud environments based on vSphere, Hyper-V, Xen, and KVM.

http://www.f5.com/about/news/press/2012/20121127b/

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Japan's Nissho Electronics Tests 8 Tbps Super-Channel with Infinera

 Nissho Electronics has successfully tested the Infinera DTN-X platform delivering 8 Terabits per second (Tbps) capacity using production ready super-channels across 800 kms of ITU-T G.653 Dispersion Shifted Fiber (DSF).

Infinera’s DTN-X platform, built upon 500 Gb/s Photonic Integrated Circuits (PIC) and the second generation FlexCoherent Processor offering software-configurable coherent modulation, offers long haul 500 Gbps super-channels which feature world class Polarization Mode Dispersion (PMD) compensation performance.

Infinera said DSF fiber, deployed throughout Japan, has proven to be a challenge in deploying high-capacity dense WDM  transport technology due to low chromatic dispersion in the C-Band, making it difficult to achieve high capacity optical transmission over long distance economically.  As a result, capacities have been severely limited and have had to utilize expensive L-band technology to achieve long haul quality performance from the DSF fiber.

The demonstration conducted with Nisho successfully transmitted  8Tbps of super-channel capacity on the C-Band over 800 kms of challenging DSF fiber.

Infinera also demonstrated the FlexCoherent capabilities of the system, showcasing the ability to software-select different modulation formats including QPSK and BPSK to optimize both reach and capacity. 


“This test truly demonstrates the value of the DTN-X platform to service providers with DSF assets,” said Kimitaka Sato, Executive Officer at Nissho. “In the past, service providers may not have been able to run even multiple 10 Gbps transmission over this kind of fiber. Infinera’s solution proves that we can run the very latest super-channel technology at 8Tbps on DSF, which is impressive.”

“This trial is unique because it  not only achieves world class reach and capacity over a very difficult type of optical fiber, it shows how quickly capacity can be turned up for service providers today,” said  Dave Welch, Infinera Co-founder, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer.  “This capability can be combined with our recently introduced Instant Bandwidth™ solution on the DTN-X to allow service providers to compete more effectively and achieve a success-based business model.”

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Trend Micro Delivers Security for Amazon's Cloud Storage Gateway

Trend Micro has optimized its cloud security for Amazon Web Services (AWS), including the newly announced AWS Storage Gateway. Trend Micro security solutions are now listed in the AWS Marketplace, providing a streamlined path to securing cloud deployment.

Trend Micro said its role is to automate the protection for new AWS instances, automating the encryption of sensitive data stored in the cloud, and centralizing the management across hybrid cloud environments.

In addition, the company said its research indicates that over 90% of targeted attacks are using spear phishing emails.

http://newsroom.trendmicro.com/index.php?s=43&news_item=1021&type=current&year=0

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Spanish Mobile Operators Offer 'Joyn' Rich Communications

Spain’s three leading mobile network operators, Movistar, Orange and Vodafone, are now offering interoperable Rich Communication Services (RCS) under the consumer-facing brand joyn.

Movistar, Orange and Vodafone are initially offering joyn services through an application for Android, with a version for the iPhone to follow shortly. 

joyn is based on the GSMA's  RCS 5.0 standard, enabling mobile users  to chat and enrich messaging or voice calls by exchanging images or video simultaneously during calls, in a private and secure manner, with any member of their contact list that has joyn, regardless of the user’s network or mobile device. Additional services, such as VoIP or IP-video caling,l will be introduced in the near future.  joyn operates on both the operators’ mobile networks and on Wi-Fi networks.

“The GSMA is delighted that joyn services are now available across Spain, giving customers a greater choice of communication possibilities without compromising the quality and security they have come to expect from their mobile operator,” said Michael O’Hara, Chief Marketing Officer, GSMA. “This initial implementation of a new technology clearly required a major effort and strong leadership in the alignment of the ecosystem of manufacturers, developers and integrators, and operators. Consumers across the world will benefit from the leading efforts of these three operators in Spain.”

Other operators who have launched joyn services include Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone Germany, and MetroPCS.

http://www.joynus.com

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Sumo Logic Raises $30 Million for Big Data Analytics

Sumo Logic, a start-up focused on big data analytics, raised $30 million in Series C funding.

Sumo Logic offers a cloud-based solution that helps enterprises to search, analyze, monitor, and visualize big data in real time, enabling application and infrastructure troubleshooting within data center, cloud and hybrid environments.

The company said it has seen rapid adoption from large-scale enterprise clients including Netflix.  Sumo Logic is based in Mountain View, California.

The funding round was led by Accel Partners, with participation from existing investors Greylock Partners and Sutter Hill Ventures. The company has raised $50.5 million to date.

“This new round is validation of our vision and innovation as a company, and testament to the traction we are seeing in the marketplace,” noted Vance Loiselle, president and CEO of Sumo Logic. “The funding positions us well to aggressively expand our powerful cloud-based analytics and log management service to a very broad section of the market.”

http://www.freesumo.com

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MegaFon Makes IPO Debut

MegaFon, which is Russia's second largest mobile operator, raised US$1.7 billion (£1.4bn) from an initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and Russia’s MICEX – RTS.  About 15 per cent of the company was sold.  Teliasonera still holds about 25% of the firm and Mr. Alisher Usmanov controls over 50% through holding companies. The shares were priced at $20 and declined after the opening to close at $19.60.

MegaFon currently serves about 63 million subscribers. In addition to its GSM 900/1800 network in Russia, MegaFon also has subsidiaries in Tajikistan, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

http://4g.moscow.megafon.ru/

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FireEye Appoints David DeWalt as CEO

FireEye, which offers next gen cybersecurity services, appointed David DeWalt as CEO.  He also serves as chairman of the board of directors. Ashar Aziz, FireEye founder and CEO, will become the company’s new vice chairman and chief strategy officer as well as continue to serve as the company’s CTO.

DeWalt is the former president, CEO, and director of McAfee, Inc.

"FireEye addresses a very critical security gap plaguing businesses today – the lack of sufficient protection against this next generation of cyber attacks. As more and more companies fall prey to cybercriminals targeting their corporate data and proprietary IP, it becomes glaringly apparent that the current approach to security is fundamentally broken. FireEye has emerged as the clear leader in combatting these advanced cyber attacks with its unique technology and platform," said DeWalt. "The company has demonstrated tremendous growth and I’m excited to work side by side with Ashar, one of the world’s foremost technologists and security thought leaders, and the entire executive team to further innovate and expand FireEye’s reach."

FireEye supplements signature-based firewalls, IPS, anti-virus, and gateways, and provides a cross-enterprise, signature-less protection against Web and email threat vectors as well as malware resident on file shares.

http://www.fireeye.com

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