Thursday 29 July 2010
Microsoft’s cloud computing platform was initially released last fall and offers an operating system and developer services that can be used individually or together. The whole shebang will hit the virtual shelves at the Professional Developer Conference in November of this year. Once available, Azure will be offered through a consumption-based pricing model. This method will allow partners and customers to pay for the services that they consume, and nothing more. Exact pricing for Azure’s OS will reportedly be US$ 0.12 per hour for computing, and US$ 0.15 per Gigabyte per month for storage. Plans include a basic US$ 9.99 per month basic edition and a US$ 99.99 per month business edition which comes with a 10 Gig database.
Cloud Computing is kind of a huge thing right now so naturally, at the initial release of Microsoft’s platform, we considered the possibility that the company was “betting the farm on Azure.” Do we still think that’s the case? Perhaps. Earlier this year we saw upgrades aimed to woo developers and the pending commercial availability certainly speaks to the needed openness.
At this year’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft, confirmed the upcoming commercial availability of their cloud services platform, Azure. Then they slapped a price tag on it. Microsoft’s cloud computing platform was initially released last fall and offers an operating system and developer services that can be used individually or together. The whole shebang will hit the virtual shelves at the Professional Developer Conference in November of this year. Once available, Azure will be offered through a consumption-based pricing model. This method will allow partners and customers to pay for the services that they consume, and nothing more.
Exact pricing for Azure’s OS will reportedly be US$ 0.12 per hour for computing, and US$ 0.15 per Gigabyte per month for storage. Plans include a basic US$ 9.99 per month basic edition and a US$ 99.99 per month business edition which comes with a 10 Gig database. Cloud Computing is kind of a huge thing right now so naturally, at the initial release of Microsoft’s platform, we considered the possibility that the company was “betting the farm on Azure.” Do we still think that’s the case? Perhaps. Earlier this year we saw upgrades aimed to woo developers and the pending commercial availability certainly speaks to the needed openness.
American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, which has been licensing artists’ and publishers’ rights since 1914, moved 91GB of scanned images of signed paperwork into Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud-based Simple Storage Service (S3). Next time your local hot spot advertises live music, or your favorite DJ spins a new tune on the radio, it’s likely that their contracts to license those songs will be stored in the cloud. John Johnson, vice president of licensing at ASCAP, says the organization had hoped to use Salesforce.com Inc.’s hosted service to manage and store digitized documents, but it offered very little storage.
Developing cloud storage strategies can be complicated, and there’s the nagging issue of security. But according to early adopters, the real silver lining of cloud storage is the savings. Analysts say that moving to cloud-based services can save IT money, because cloud computing involves the use of a shared infrastructure and allows certain costs to shift from capital expenses to operating expenses. One early user, Peter Hedlund, a programmer at Encyclopedia Virginia in Charlottesville, Va., says he’s interested in cloud storage because he likes the predictable prices he can get from Zetta Inc., a cloud storage service provider in Sunnyvale, Calif.
Cloudize Inc., a collaboration service, uses cloud storage from Nirvanix Inc. in San Diego. The San Francisco-based start-up pays the same rate as Encyclopedia Virginia — 25 cents per gigabyte per month, which Cloudize CEO Edwin Fu says is ideal for planning and budgeting. But he also likes the fact that Nirvanix applies that price to his entire company’s online storage use, instead of charging on a per-user basis.
