SiliconANGLE » Amazon

Amazon, Redbox Expand Streaming Video with M&A, Blip Raises $12M

Saroj Kar — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:30:30 +0000

There’s a new dawn for streaming video services, promising cheaper access to millions of video convents. Amazon is gearing up their streaming service in partnership with Viacom to provide a stiff competition to Netflix, while Blip raised a new round of funding to enhance their web content. Here are some recent developments in streaming video sector.

Amazon Expands its Catalog with Viacom

The online retailer has a deal with the media group Viacom that allows it to expand its range of videos available to stream on the internet, and represents the final steps in a plan to launch a subscription service to compete with Netflix.

The online video market, currently dominated by Netflix, should become increasingly competitive in the coming years as large companies are entering this segment. Netflix currently streams service with nearly 22 million subscribers in the United States.

Subscribers to Amazon Prime, benefiting from both improved delivery times for their free online shipping and web-based video streaming, will have access to a total catalog of 15,000 movies and TV television programs, with the addition of Viacom programs covered by this new deal.

Viacom, which claims MTV, Nickelodeon and Paramount Studios in its conglomerate, will now be available on Amazon’s Prime Instant Video service. Until now, major media companies like CBS, Warner Bros. Time Warner, News Corp Fox, Sony, Comcast, NBC Universal and Walt Disney have licensed programming to Amazon.

The improvement of this catalog also allows Amazon to provide even more attractive content to its multimedia Kindle Fire tablet. Amazon wants to open its collection of licensed films and television programs as a separate service for clients outside the prime segment, and use it to boost the Kindle Fire tablet.

Analysts estimate that Amazon sold about five million Kindle Fire tablets in the fourth quarter, and the company can sell more than double that in 2012. An essential part of Amazon’s strategy is to have lots of content, including video, music and applications for tablets users.

Blip Raises $12-Million Round of Funding

Online video network Blip.tv announced a $12-million round of funding. The company is also re-branding its name from Blip.tv to simply Blip.

Blip will use the new cash to develop more sophisticated tools and products for web content providers. Blip will also utilize the funding to enrich its advertising and distribution platforms.

The new round of funding includes investment from Bain Capital and Canaan Parters. The company earlier had raised an equal amount of debt funding from Silicon Valley Bank.

Blips currently has more than 13 million unique monthly visitors in the US. The company provides 330 million video views per month to its 30 million users globally, counting one fourth of these are paying subscribers. It also streams video content to a number of other platforms such as iTunes, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Roku, Verizon FiOS, TiVo and Sony TV.

Redbox Acquires Blockbuster Express

Movie and video game rental kiosk provider, Redbox (parent company Coinstar), has entered into an agreement to buy NCR Blockbuster Express kiosks and related assets for $100 million. The acquisition includes the purchase of the DVD kiosks, certain retailer contracts, and DVD inventory from NCR’s entertainment line of business.

The latest move comes just after Redbox entered a deal with Verizon to offer a new movie streaming service similar to Netflix. Redbox, which currently has 35,400 kiosks installed nationwide and roughly 9,000 existing Blockbuster kiosks will rebrand the acquired Blockbuster kiosks with its Redbox label.

“We are very pleased to enter into this agreement with NCR,” said Scott Di Valerio, chief financial officer of Coinstar, Inc. and interim president of Redbox. “As the global self-service solutions leader, NCR has strong technology, manufacturing and servicing capabilities, and we look forward to leveraging their expertise as Coinstar continues to grow its core automated retail businesses and expands its offerings.”

YouTube still leads the online video market. But the majority of big and small players are now looking to create more video inventory and a range of services around premium content to attract more users and create a new online video advertising ecosystem.

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In the same vein:

Red Hat Launches New AWS Tool

Saroj Kar — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:40:08 +0000

Taking effect this month, Amazon will be lowering the prices for its Amazon S3 services. Depending on the amount of stored data, the price cuts are from 0 to 13.5 percent. S3 is Amazon’s online storage service, where the company virtualizes the storage and makes them available to customers through an API.

According to the company’s new tariffs, data stored up to 50 TB will see a 12 percent reduction in cost, and storage more than 500 TB will see a cost reduction of 13.5 percent. Amazon has cut the price from $0.14 per gigabyte per month to $0.125 for the first terabyte of data, and $0.110 per gigabyte per month for the next 49 TB, instead of the earlier $0.125.

The new price plan will be applicable only for US consumers. For other regions, Amazon has published a separate data storage outline.

On the company’s official blog, Jeff Barr, vice president of Amazon Web Services, said “there’s been a lot written lately about storage availability and prices. We’ve often talked about the benefits that AWS’s scale and focus creates for our customers. Our ability to lower prices again now is an example of this principle at work.”

Amazon explains that the decline in costs is due to the exponential growth of the Cloud. Last week, AWS made the astounding announcement that it had stored 762 billion objects in 2011. That year the number of stored items increased by 192 percent, making it the largest annual increase since the creation of Amazon Web Services.

Last month, AWS launched AWS Cloud Gateway today, which connects on-premise software appliances with cloud-based storage.

Red Hat Storage Appliance for the Amazon Cloud

Not surprisingly, the Amazon Web Services ecosystem continues to grow. Market leader in enterprise Linux, Red Hat, announced their Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services this week as well. According to Red Hat, the new appliance will offer excellent performance by taking advantage of Amazon’s cloud services.

The Virtual Storage Appliance for AWS is a software implementation on EC2 and EBS (Elastic Block Storage). Thus, a NAS file server can be run directly into the cloud. According to Red Hat, this also means that all applications can be lifted with support of NAS storage without any adjustments to the cloud.

“Essentially what we are providing is network-attached storage in the cloud,” said Tom Trainer, storage product marketing manager at Red Hat. “Availability is a very important aspect of any storage system, irrespective of if it’s based in an enterprise’s own data center or in the cloud. Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services can do synchronous replication in one AWS region and multiple availability zones.”

The appliance is based on virtual storage appliance from Gluster, a company and product that Red Hat acquired in October last year. Red Hat plans to introduce the appliance in clouds from other providers in near future.

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In the same vein:

Xoom Tablets Sold with User Data on Woot: Privacy Oops!

Mellisa Tolentino — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:38:14 +0000

Privacy alert! Motorola Mobility admitted that some refurbished Motorola Xoom tablets were shipped still containing the previous owners’ data because they failed to wipe the slate clean.

It was reported that in the period of Otober-December 2011, some 6,200 Motorola Xooms were sold at Woot, the online retailer, and out of the total Xooms sold, about 100 of them were sold still having the previous owners’ data.

Motorola is offering a two-year membership to Experian’s ProtectMyID Alert for previous Xoom owners who bought their tablets between March and October 2011 and returned it. The service will hopefully prevent identity theft.

Motorola also wants the incompletely unrefurbished Xooms back. They are calling out to all those who purchased the Xoom tablet from Woot between October to December 2011. If they are in possession of said tablets or think they are or they just want to be sure, Motorola is asking the Xoom owners to contact them either at motorola.com/xoomreturn or call 1-800-734-5870 and select option 1.

“Motorola sincerely regrets and apologizes for any inconvenience this situation has caused the affected customers,” the company said in a statement. “Motorola is committed to rigorous data protection practices in order to protect its customers, and will continue to take the necessary steps to achieve this objective.”

Lesson learned, if you’re unsatisfied with your device or you just want to get a new one, before returning your gadgets make sure you do a fatory reset to wipe the slate clean. If your device has a memory card, erase all content or reformat it to remove saved date. If your device offers encryption, encrypt it just to be sure and change your passwords often to lessen the possibility of having your accounts hacked.

More iPad Users Satisfied

On an interesting note, nothing like this happens with iPad owners as far as we know, and the reason behind this might be because iPad users are happier with their devices, hardly feeling the need to return them.

According to a recent poll by ChangeWave comparing Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle Fire, 74% of iPad users were satisfied with their device while only 54% of Kindle Fire users were happy with tablet, and only 49% user of other brands were happy with their tablets. In short, other tablets have the higher possibility of getting returned compared to iPads and Kindle Fires.

In dissecting the poll, the reasons why Kindle Fire users aren’t happy with their tablets are: the lack of external volume control as the top peeve at 27%, followed by not having a camera at 21%, short battery life at 15%, lack of 3G/4G capability at 12%, few apps available also at 12%, screen size at 10%, the lack of microphone at 10% and the less-than-strategic location of the power button also at 10%.

iPad 3 Soon?

According to some reports, the iPad 3 will be launched in March. An LTE version will be released in the US while the 3G version will be launched in other countries. The iPad 3 is said to feature Long-Term Evolution, a quad-core CPU, and a new high-definition screen.

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In the same vein:

Android Tablet Sales Figures Questioned Amidst Amazon Kindle Fire Boon

Mellisa Tolentino — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 16:40:04 +0000

Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan estimated that Amazon sold six million Kindle Fires in the fourth quarter, but during yesterday’s earnings’ call, Amazon’s top executives did not clarify how many units they actually sold, or even how much profit they gained because of the tablet. At $199, Amazon spends more in making the Kindle Fire than selling it, but hopes that the money saved by consumers who bought the tablet would be spent in their store. Amazon’s fourth- quarter revenue was at $17.4 billion, less than the $18.3 billion estimated by analysts, and the company’s net income fell 57% to $177 million, or 38 cents a share, from the previous year’s $416 million, or 91 cents.

Android and iOS products have been compared not only in features and performance, but most of all in sales. With the Android platform available for any OEM to use, there are hoards of Android tablets from different brands wandering the market. With that in mind, it’s so easy to believe that more people are buying Android tablets than iPads, but is this really true?

Iffy Android numbers?

Galen Gruman of InfoWorld pointed out how Android numbers are misleading. First off, OEMs using the Android platform aren’t really revealing the their true sales number, what most of them reveal are the numbers of units shipped, and this doesn’t mean they were sold. Second, if the tablets are not sold, retail stores ship the unsold devices back to where they came from and no one really looks at the return number or the number of devices returned to the manufacturers. And third, if there really are more Android tablets than iPads, then why is it that 88% of web traffic generated by tablets are from iPads? Are Android tablet users not using their devices to browse the web? Think about it.

RIM takes on Android

Do you remember when Microsoft’s Senior Director of Windows Phone 7 Brandon Watson, offered free phones, dev tools, and training and other resources to webOS developers, encouraging them to jump ship? Research in Motion is doing the same thing to Android app developers, except they don’t offer freebies, just the privilege of porting their apps to the BlackBerry PlayBook in time for the launch of the OS 2.0 in February.

The BlackBerry Runtime for Android apps allows the Android applications to run on the BlackBerry PlayBook, but these apps must first be repackaged into the compatible BAR file format. App developers can choose from the Eclipse Plugin -BlackBerry Plugin for Android Development Tools, Online Tool – BlackBerry Packager for Android apps, and the Command-line tools – BlackBerry SDK for Android apps. And of course, you have to remove anything that pertains to Android and the Android Market in the app description or elsewhere before it gets published, and you have to submit it before February 6.

Microsoft tablets have a shot

ARM, the UK-based chipmaker, reported some outstanding results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2011, and they have the high demand for mobile devices to thank for their recent upswing. ARM chips are the number one choice for mobile devices by manufacturers, since they use up less energy compared to Intel chips. But Intel isn’t happy about ARM’s lead in the mobile sector, as they want to dominate the mobile plane as well. To that end, they launched the Lenovo K800 smartphone powered by Intel at the CES 2012. But it looks like these two chipmakers would be working closely together on an Android tablet competitor – a Windows 8 tablet with both ARM and Intel chips.

ARM’s CEO Warren East discusses the great potential of Windows 8 tablet stating that the familiarity of users to Windows would be its leverage.

“Consumers are familiar with Microsoft and very familiar with Windows and they’re less familiar with an Android environment. Microsoft has an awareness advantage with consumers that the Android folks didn’t have,” East said.

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In the same vein:

RIM Loses Footing In Europe, Kindle Fire Sales at 6M

Mellisa Tolentino — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:05:37 +0000

Research in Motion is running out of markets to sell their products. With Apple dominating in North America and Samsung gearing up to do the same in Europe, RIM’s walls are quickly closing in and they have no one else to blame but themselves. RIM’s BlackBerry devices were once the top choice for business people, but with delayed updates, the business sector is now looking elsewhere for mobile products that cater to their needs.

RIM’s secret weapon, and hopefully the answer to their declining market problem, is the BlackBerry 10, their latest software offering. Unfortunately, phones supporting BB10 will not be launching until late this year.

RIM’s new CEO Thorsten Heins is also counting on the security flaws of other mobile devices being used in workplaces, and they are banking on it to drive consumers their way.

“They are in a pickle. Their pickle is security,” Heins said in an interview. “When the first big security flaw even happens in one of the large enterprises, you will see this turn around. Wait for the day this happens.”

Kindle Fire

Android faces a great deal of competition and security concerns heading into the workplace, but the consumer market is ripe for some of its more popular devices, particularly the Kindle Fire. Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan estimated Amazon’s sales for the Kindle Fire tablet at about six million units in the fourth quarter, claiming that the tablet is a true iPad contender.

“Kindle Fire has staked out an important market position due to its loyal Amazon customer base and attractive (low) device pricing,” Rohan said in a note to clients. “We believe the lower hardware price will correlate with high e-book and video content attach rates.”

Previous studies showed that Amazon loses money by selling the Kindle Fire at such a low price, but Amazon is hopeful that the loss could be compensated by sales of media compatible with the tablet that can be purchased in Amazon.

Other Mobile News

Nokia will be launching a white Lumia 800 in Australia by March to add to their existing black, cyan and magenta variants. Pricing is yet to be announced.

The 5.3-inch screen Samsung Galaxy Note is hitting the US market on February 19, under AT&T for $299.99 with a two-year plan. Pre-orders will start on February 5 and is available in two variants, carbon blue and ceramic white.

Of the available 4G smartphones in the market, the Motorola Droid Razr Maxx may have major appeal in terms of battery life. It lasted 8 hours and 25 minutes on the LAPTOP Battery Test which involves continuous surfing over 4G with the phone set to 40% brightness. The Droid Razr Maxx is available in Verizon.

And finally, Apple is faced with some bad PR because of the reportedly horrid working conditions at Foxconn, which supplies parts for their products. Apple CEO Tim Cook is reportedly outraged with the unsafe working condition at Foxconn and swore to step up their audits in Foxconn as well as other suppliers. Apple cut ties with factories found to be violating workers’ rights.

Apple isn’t the only company that uses Foxconn, Nokia, Dell and Microsoft are among popular brands that get their supplies from the Chinese factory. One technology writer, Dan Lyons, wrote an eye-opening piece with regards to the “boycott Apple” appeal,

“Ultimately the blame lies not with Apple and other electronics companies – but with us, the consumers. And ultimately we are the ones who must demand change.”

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In the same vein:

Netflix is Asking for It: Deems Amazon its Nemesis

Kristina Farrah — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:17:31 +0000

Good intuition or paranoia, Netflix sure does a good job at peaking the interest of the technology scene. In a letter to shareholders disseminated yesterday, Netflix says Amazon was advised to spin off Amazon Prime’s streaming video section, Instant Video, to compete with Netflix’s Watch Instantly service.

“One class of competitors is the other over-the-top pure plays such as Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime,” the letter reads, adding, “We expect Amazon to continue to offer their video service as a free extra with Prime domestically, but also to brand their video subscription offering as a standalone service at a price less than ours.”

Amazon’s Instant Video comes free with a $79 subscription to Amazon Prime though non-subscribers can still buy or rent individual movies and TV episodes on a per-title basis. The New York Post said the new service would be derived from the Netflix’s business model in a way, but spokespeople from both Netflix and Amazon have yet to comment on this speculation. The report also said that Amazon is already working on the matter, but has been having a tough time with licensing.

“The big issue is their bundled media service,” spills the “unnamed digital media executive” to post. “The subscription service, with the goodies being free video, is contractually an issue for the licensers.”

Amazon is not at all new to the streaming content space, as it holds Lovefilm in the UK. The subsidiary successfully offers DVD rentals by mail, and streams content online to subscribers as well. It has been doing so even before Netflix took up a similar business model with international appeal. Amazon was Lovefilm’s largest shareholder in 2008, until last year when it finally took ownership of the company.

But Netflix doesn’t seem to be that worried about the potential and current competition from Amazon, or Hulu Plus for that matter, as “both Amazon and Hulu Plus’s content is a fraction of our content, and we believe their respective total viewing hours are each less than 10% of ours.”

There’s also the issue of whether or not Amazon can win over the hearts of Netflix users with a price war. Netflix has recovered quite well from its price hike and product changes last year, as their sales and user base continue to increase. They currently have 220,000 consumers and earned 21.6 million in Q4 2011.

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In the same vein:

AWS (Amazon) Storage Gateway, First, Second and Third Impressions

Greg Schulz — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:23:53 +0000

Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced the beta of their new storage gateway functionality that enables access of Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Services) from your different applications using an appliance installed in your data center site. With this beta launch, Amazon joins other startup vendors who are providing standalone gateway appliance products (e.g. Nasuni, Certa, etc) along with those who have disappeared from the market (e.g. Cirtas). In addition to gateway vendors, there are also those with cloud access added to their software tools such as (e.g. Jungle Disk that access both Rack space and Amazon S3 along with Commvault Simpana Cloud connector among others). There are also vendors that have joined cloud access gateways as part of their storage systems such as TwinStrata among others. Even EMC (and here) has gotten into the game adding qualified cloud access support to some of their products.

What is a cloud storage gateway?

Before going further, lets take a step back and address what for some may be a fundemental quesiton of what is a cloud storage gateway?

Cloud services such as storage are accessed via some type of network, either the public Internet or a private connection. The type of cloud service being accessed (figure 1) will decide what is needed. For example, some services can be accessed using a standard Web browser, while others must plug-in or add-on modules. Some cloud services may need downloading an application, agent, or other tool for accessing the cloud service or resources, while others give an on-site or on-premises appliance or gateway.

Figure 1: Accessing and using clouds (From Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press))

Cloud access software and gateways or appliances are used for making cloud storage accessible to local applications. The gateways, as well as enabling cloud access, provide replication, snapshots, and other storage services functionality. Cloud access gateways or server-based software include tools from BAE, Citrix, Gladinet, Mezeo, Nasuni, Openstack, Twinstrata and Zadara among others. In addition to cloud gateway appliances or cloud points of presence (cpops), access to public services is also supported via various software tools. Many data protection tools including backup/restore, archiving, replication, and other applications have added (or are planning to add) support for access to various public services such as Amazon, Goggle, Iron Mountain, Microsoft, Nirvanix, or Rack space among several others.

Some of the tools have added native support for one or more of the cloud services leveraging various applicaiotn programming interfaces (APIs), while other tools or applications rely on third-party access gateway appliances or a combination of native and appliances. Another option for accessing cloud resources is to use tools (Figure 2) supplied by the service provider, which may be their own, from a third-party partner, or open source, as well as using their APIs to customize your own tools.

For example, I can use my Amazon S3 or Rackspace storage accounts using their web and other provided tools for basic functionality. However, for doing backups and restores, I use the tools provided by the service provider, which then deal with two different cloud storage services. The tool presents an interface for defining what to back up, protect, and restore, as well as enabling shared (public or private) storage devices and network drives. In addition to providing an interface (Figure 2), the tool also speaks specific API and protocols of the different services, including PUT (create or update a container), POST (update header or Meta data), LIST (retrieve information), HEAD (metadata information access), GET (retrieve data from a container), and DELETE (remove container) functions. Note that the real behavior and API functionality will vary by service provider. The importance of mentioning the above example is that when you look at some cloud storage services providers, you will see mention of PUT, POST, LIST, HEAD, GET, and DELETE operations as well as services such as capacity and availability. Some services will include an unlimited number of operations, while others will have fees for doing updates, listing, or retrieving your data in addition to basic storage fees. By being aware of cloud primitive functions such as PUT or POST and GET or LIST, you can have a better idea of what they are used for as well as how they play into evaluating different services, pricing, and services plans.

Depending on the type of cloud service, various protocols or interfaces may be used, including iSCSI, NAS NFS, HTTP or HTTPs, FTP, REST, SOAP, and Bit Torrent, and APIs and PaaS mechanisms including .NET or SQL database commands, in addition to XM, JSON, or other formatted data. VMs can be moved to a cloud service using file transfer tools or upload capabilities of the provider. For example, a VM such as a VMDK or VHD is prepared locally in your environment and then uploaded to a cloud provider for execution. Cloud services may give an access program or utility that allows you to configure when, where, and how data will be protected, similar to other backup or archive tools.

Some traditional backup or archive tools have added direct or via third party support for accessing IaaS cloud storage services such as Amazon, Rack space, and others. Third-party access appliance or gateways enable existing tools to read and write data to a cloud environment by presenting a standard interface such as NAS (NFS and/or CIFS) or iSCSI (Block) that gets mapped to the back-end cloud service format. For example, if you subscribe to Amazon S3, storage is allocated as objects and various tools are used to use or utilize. The cloud access software or appliance understands how to communicate with the IaaS storage APIs and abstracts those from how they are used. Access software tools or gateways, in addition to translating or mapping between cloud APIs, formats your applications including security with encryption, bandwidth optimization, and data footprint reduction such as compression and de-duplication. Other functionality include reporting, management tools that support various interfaces, protocols and standards including SNMP or SNIA, Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMIS), and Cloud Data Management Initiative (CDMI).

First impression: Interesting, good move Amazon, I was ready to install and start testing it today

The good news here is that Amazon is taking steps to make it easier for your existing applications and IT environments to use and leverage clouds for private and hybrid adoption models with both an Amazon branded and managed services, technology and associated tools.

This means leveraging your existing Amazon accounts to simplify procurement, management, ongoing billing as well as leveraging their infrastructure. As a standalone gateway appliance (e.g. it does not have to be bundled as part of a specific backup, archive, replication or other data management tool), the idea is that you can insert the technology into your existing data center between your servers and storage to begin sending a copy of data off to Amazon S3. In addition to sending data to S3, the integrated functionality with other AWS services should make it easier to integrated with Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) and Elastic Block storage (EBS) capabilities including snapshots for data protection.

Thus my first impression of AWS storage gateway at a high level view is good and interesting resulting in looking a bit deeper resulting in a second impression.

Second impression: Hmm, what does it really do and require, time to slow down and do more home work

Digging deeper and going through the various publicly available material (note can only comment or discuss on what is announced or publicly available) results in a second impression of wanting and needing to dig deeper based on some of caveats. Now granted and in fairness to Amazon, this is of course a beta release and hence while on first impression it can be easy to miss the notice that it is in fact a beta so keep in mind things can and hopefully will change.

Pricing aside, which means as with any cloud or managed storage service, you will want to do a cost analysis model just as you would for procuring physical storage, look into the cost of monthly gateway fee along with its associated physical service running VMware ESXi configuration that you will need to supply. Chances are that if you are an average sized SMB, you have a physical machine (PM) laying around that you can throw a copy of ESXi on to if you dont already have room for some more VMs on an existing one.

You will also need to assess the costs for using the S3 storage including space capacity charges, access and other fees as well as charges for doing snapshots or using other functionality. Again these are not unique to Amazon or their cloud gateway and should be best practices for any service or solution that you are considering. Amazon makes it easy by the way to see their base pricing for different tiers of availability, geographic locations and optional fees.

Speaking of accessing the cloud, and cloud conversations, you will also want to keep in mind what your networking bandwidth service requirements will be to move data to Amazon that might not already be doing so.

Another thing to consider with the AWS storage gateway is that it does not replace your local storage (that is unless you move your applications to Amazon EC2 and EBS), rather makes a copy of what every you save locally to a remote Amazon S3 storage pool. This can be good for high availability (HA), business continuance (BC), disaster recovery (DR) and compliance among other data management needs. However in your cost model you also need to keep in mind that you are not replacing your local storage, you are adding to it via the cloud which should be seen as complimenting and enhancing your private now to be hybrid environment.

Walking the cloud data protection talk

FWIW, I leverage a similar model where I use a service (Jungle Disk) where critical copies of my data get sent to that service which in turn places copies at Rack space (Jungledisks parent) and Amazon S3. What data goes to where depends on different policies that I have established. I also have local backup copies as well as master gold disaster copy stored in a secure offsite location. The idea is that when needed, I can get a good copy restored from my cloud providers quickly regardless of where I am if the local copy is not good. On the other hand, experience has already demonstrated that without sufficient network bandwidth services, if I need to bring back 100s of GBytes or TBytes of data quickly, Im going to be better off bring back onsite my master gold copy, then applying fewer, smaller updates from the cloud service. In other words, the technologies compliment each other.

By the way, a lesson learned here is that once my first copy is made which have data footprint reduction (DFR) techniques applied (e.g. compress, de dupe, optimized, etc), later copies occur very fast. However subsequent restores of those large files or volumes also takes longer to retrieve from the cloud vs. sending up changed versions. Thus be aware of backup vs. restore times, something of which will apply to any cloud provider and can be mitigated by appliances that do local caching. However also keep in mind that if a disaster occurs, will your local appliance be affected and its cache rendered useless.

Getting back to AWS storage gateway and my second impression is that at first it sounded great.

However then I realized it only supports iSCSI and FWIW, nothing wrong with iSCSI, I like it and recommend using it where applicable, even though Im not using it. I would like to have seen a NAS (either NFS and/or CIFS) support for a gateway making it easier for in my scenario different applications, servers and systems to use and leverage the AWS services, something that I can do with my other gateways provided via different software tools. Granted for those environments that already are using iSCSI for your servers that will be using AWS storage gateway, then this is a non issue while for others it is a consideration including cost (time) to factor in to prepare your environment for using the ability.

Depending on the amount of storage you have in your environment, the next item that caught my eye may or may not be an issue that the iSCSI gateway supports up to 1TB volumes and up to 12 of them hence a largest capacity of 12TB under management. This can be gotten around by using multiple gateways however the increased complexity balanced to the benefit the functionality is something to consider.

Third impression: Dig deeper, learn more, address various questions

This leads up to my third impression the need to dig deeper into what AWS storage gateway can and cannot do for various environments. I can see where it can be a fit for some environments while for others at least in its beta version will be a non starter. In the meantime, do your homework, look around at other options which ironically by having Amazon launching a gateway service may reinvigorate the market place of some of the standalone or embedded cloud gateway solution providers.

What is needed for using AWS storage gateway

In addition to having an S3 account, you will need to acquire for a monthly fee the storage gateway appliance which is software installed into a VMware ESXi hypervisor virtual machine (VM). The requirements are VMware ESXi hypervisor (v4.1) on a physical machine (PM) with at least 7.5GB of RAM and four (4) virtual processors assigned to the appliance VM along with 75GB of disk space for the Open Virtual Alliance (OVA) image installation and data. You will also need to have an proper sized network connection to Amazon. You will also need iSCSI initiators on either Windows server 2008, Windows 7 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Note that the AWS storage gateway beta is optimized for block write sizes greater than 4Kbytes and warns that smaller IO sizes can cause overhead resulting in lost storage space. This is a consideration for systems that have not yet changed your file systems and volumes to use the larger allocation sizes.

Some closing thoughts, tips and comments:

Congratulations to Amazon for introducing and launching an AWS branded storage gateway.
Amazon brings trust the value of trust to a cloud relationship.
Initially I was excited about the idea of using a gateway that any of may systems could use my S3 storage pools with vs. using gateway access functions that are part of different tools such as my backup software or via Amazon web tools. Likewise I was excited by the idea of having an easy to install and use gateway that would allow me to grow in a cost effective way.
Keep in mind that this solution or at least in its beta version DOES NOT replace your existing iSCSI based storage needs, instead it compliments what you already have.
I hope Amazon listens carefully to what they customers and prospects want vs. need to evolve the functionality.
This announcement should reinvigorate some of the cloud appliance vendors as well as those who have embedded functionality to Amazon and other providers.
Keep bandwidth services and optimization in mind both for sending data as well as for when retrieving during a disaster or small file restore.
In concept, the AWS storage gateway is not all that different than appliances that do snapshots and other local and remote data protection such as those from Actifio, EMC (Recoverpoint), Falconstor or dedicated gateways such as those from Nasuni among others.
Here is a link to added AWS storage gateways frequently asked questions (FAQs).
If the AWS were available with a NAS interface, I would probably be activating it this afternoon even with some of their other requirements and cost aside.
Im still formulating my fourth impression which is going to take some time, perhaps if I can get Amazon to help sell more of my books so that I can get some money to afford to test the entire solution leveraging my existing S3, EC2 and EBS accounts I might do so in the future, otherwise for now, will continue to research.
Learn more about the AWS storage gateway beta, check out this free Amazon web cast on February 23, 2012.

Learn more abut cloud based data protection, data footprint reduction, cloud gateways, access and management, check out my book Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press) which is of course available on Amazon Kindle as well as via hard cover print copy also available at Amazon.com.

[Cross-posted at StorageIO Blog]

AWS (Amazon) Storage Gateway, First, Second and Third Impressions is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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In the same vein:

Amazon Kindle Fire Could be More Profitable Product Than You Think

Saroj Kar — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:04:58 +0000

We all know that the Amazon Kindle Fire sells for only $199.99, and Amazon reportedly losses $2 to $3 on each sell. But selling a device for a loss – Amazon is actually making profitable money from it. According to a survey conducted by investment firm Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), each Kindle Fire is found to generate more than $136 in added revenue for Amazon.

“Kindle Fire unit economics are likely to be more favorable than consensus expectations, based primarily on frequency of digital goods purchases,” said RBC Capital analyst Ross Sandler on the research. “Our assumption is that Amazon could sell 3-4 million Kindle Fire units in Q4, and that those units are accretive to company-average operating margin within the first six months of ownership. Our analysis assigns a cumulative lifetime operating income per unit of $136, with a cumulative operating margin of over 20 percent.”

RBC has conducted a proprietary survey of 216 Kindle Fire owners based on how they’re using their new tablets, and Amazon’s potential profit and revenue from selling software, hardware, digital and physical goods.

The brokerage firm estimates that on an average, Kindle Fire owners would purchase five e-books per quarter, and assuming an average selling price for each e-book is $9.99 and Amazon’s commission is 30 percent, the company would end of with $15 per Kindle each quarter, a high margin for revenue.

In addition, Sandler estimates the other revenues will come from Apps. Typical Kindle Fire owners would purchase three paid apps per quarter, and assuming each paid app would generate a 20 percent margin, the company will make another $9 per Kindle Fire in revenue. The rest will come from digital goods, games, video-on-demand purchases and rentals, Prime memberships and physical goods sales – ending the figure at $136.

Amazon recently revealed new figures about the success of the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select program. The program allow customer to borrow one book per month and in return Amazon earned $1.70 per borrow. The company has increased funding to the program by $200,000 to a monthly $700,000 by lending more than 295,000 KDP books in December.

The Kindle Fire has become extremely popular throughout the holiday season and was considered one of the most connected devices from a survey by location-based mobile media company JiWire. Millennial Media has also seen growth for the Kindle Fire on its mobile ad network. Overall the Kindle Fire is a win for Amazon’s bottom line, and will provide a boost to its existing ecosystem.

Amazon Kindle Fire Could be More Profitable Product Than You Think is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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In the same vein:

Amazon Seeing Success on both Sides of the Kindle Aisle

Maria Deutscher — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 20:36:38 +0000

Amazon released some new figures about the success of the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select program, which launched in December. The retail giant says that the Kindle E-Book Lending Library now features over 75,000 titles, and demand is on the rise thanks to KDP Select.

Customers are allowed to borrow one book per month, and in December 295,000 KDP Select books have been lend by Amazon. This growth drove the company to increase funding to the program by $200,000 to a monthly $700,000.

“KDP Select appears to be earning authors more money in two ways. We knew customers would love having KDP Select titles in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. But we’ve been surprised by how much paid sales of those same titles increased, even relative to the rest of KDP,” said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President of Kindle Content. “Due to this early success and a seasonally strong January, we’re adding a $200,000 bonus to January’s KDP Select fund, growing this month’s total pool to $700,000.”

Authors earned $1.70 per borrow, and the top 10 ones that selected to market their books via KDP Select have seen a 30 percent increase in income compared to their November earnings.

The program has proved to be a good investment on behalf of Amazon, but it’s not the only driver behind a growth in e-book borrowing and purchasing. The Kindle Fire has become extremely popular throughout the holiday season and beyond, and that momentum is only growing. WiFi network operator JiWire reported that the number of connected Kindle Fires more than tripled after the holidays, with Denver and Los Angeles leading the connectivity growth chart. Millennial has also seen growth on its ad network, and said on Dec 20 that Kindle Fire impressions increased 19 percent since launch.

Amazon Seeing Success on both Sides of the Kindle Aisle is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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In the same vein:

Amazon Opens More Microsoft Functionality for Free Users

Maria Deutscher — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 20:01:16 +0000

The latest post on the AWS blog reveals an update to the AWS Free Usage Tier, which has been made more attractive for the sake of free users. A Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 EC2 t1.micro instance can now be run for up to 750 hours per month without charge, and another 750 hours are available to users who are running Linux.

In addition to the added time cap, the Elastic Block Storage allocation has been increased to 30GB. This covers Windows’s memory requirements but is not enough to power Linux at the same time, though it is a big enough boost to pull in Microsoft customers that want to try out AWS.

Several other service enhancements were announced as well, including Elastic Load Balancer time and bandwidth and Amazon and SimpleDB storage. On top of that up to two million I/O requests can be now be processed per month, and a lot of documentation has been added.

An updated (and even more helpful) Amazon EC2 Microsoft Windows Guide.
Getting Started Guide: Web Application Hosting for Microsoft Windows.
The Getting Started Guide includes a new section on Deploying a WordPress Blog.
Our Windows and .NET Developer Center.
A brand new AWS Microsite, with a focus on running Windows on Amazon EC2.
Additional documentation on the AWS free usage tier, including eligibility information and some tips for making the most of it.

Amazon Web Services has been slashing rates and updating pricing plans in the past two or three years in order to maintain its position in the growingly competitive PaaS space. The last such initiative Amazon undertook recently before this latest update was in December, when a new model pricing model was coupled with the Reserve Instances service.

Amazon Opens More Microsoft Functionality for Free Users is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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