| Apr 02, 2012 |
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The U.S. National Institutes of Health announced Friday  (March 30) that it'll be hosting data from its 1,000 Genomes Project for free on Amazon's cloud service. The 1,000 Genomes Project is the world's largest database of human genetics . It was created to act as a "reference population," including people of different ethnicities around the world, and it captures all the major ways in which humankind varies genetically. Now that they are hosted on Amazon's servers, the data in 1000 Genomes will be easier and cheaper for scientists to obtain and analyze.
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| Mar 29, 2012 |
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The entire contents of the National Institutes of Health's 1000 Genomes Project—all 200-terabytes of it—will be made freely available to the public, the agency announced today. The project is touted as the world's largest set of data on human genetic variation. Amazon's cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, will store the database .
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| Mar 29, 2012 |
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Amazon’s cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, will store for public use the entire contents of the National Institutes of Health’s 1000 Genomes Project, a survey of genetic information from 1,700 individuals that is some 200 terabytes in size. Anyone can access the information for free, and there is no requirement to share any research results.
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| Mar 29, 2012 |
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Even the U.S. government is getting in on so-called big data.
Today, the Obama administration said it would make $200 million in new research and development investments to glean insights from large and complex collections of digital data. The government said it also would try to expand the number of workers who are able to sift through huge piles of digital data to find scientific or business insights.
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| Mar 27, 2012 |
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WHILE many businesses take a gradual approach to the adoption of cloud computing, one Australian company has used it to re-design its entire IT infrastructure. Private education group Think Education has shifted about 70 per cent of its systems on to a cloud platform in a move the company says has reduced IT capital expenditure by more than two-thirds. The company has eight colleges across Australia providing education services for more than 8000 students. Courses range from business and communications to hospitality and design.
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| Mar 23, 2012 |
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Amazon’s cloud computing service is being used to operate Nasa robots on the surface of Mars, Netflix’s video streaming service and the Guardian’s dating website, as the retailer’s little-known IT business rapidly expands.
The six-year old cloud business remains overshadowed by Amazon’s vast online store, but clients and analysts say the company’s various cloud-computing services are replacing a growing number of in-house IT functions and dominate the sector.
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| Mar 15, 2012 |
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Many people speak of cloud computing as if it’s been around for decades. In a way, it has. But today’s use of the phrase is more specific than simply a great big network in the sky. Understanding the cloud will determine whether it helps organizations realize the efficiencies and cost savings it promises or the opportunities that float on by.
In its simplest form, cloud computing enables organizations to purchase computing power and data storage services from third-party providers who offer these products via the Internet. Rather than investing in their own data centers or servers, businesses and agencies can pay as they go, which allows them to expand—or contract—as needed.
This business model offers several benefits; among the most attractive are lower upfront costs and increased agility. Organizations no longer have to predict how many servers they may need when their business grows. Yet, when an organization’s growth exceeds expectations, the server capacity it needs to succeed can be in place in minutes rather than weeks.
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| Mar 12, 2012 |
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With gadgets blurring the boundaries between personal and working lives, a Sydney-based start-up looks well placed to capitalise on the trend and is already gaining the attention of Silicon Valley.
Deputy.com makes people management software that helps hotel chains, construction firms and other organisations with a decentralised workforce communicate more effectively with staff. It has only 80 customers and 4000 users, but hopes the popularity of smartphones and tablets will see its software in the pockets of workers across the country and eventually all over the world.
Scaling up to meet future demand will not be a problem because the business is built entirely on the cloud infrastructure of Amazon Web Services.
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| Mar 08, 2012 |
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Cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services is heralding the era of utility supercomputing, whereby massive computational resources and storage requirements can be accessed on demand.
Speaking at the launch of Intel's Xeon E5 processor family in London this week, AWS technology evangelist in residence, Dr. Matt Wood, said that cloud computing was a utility service like electricity and gas, in that it allows consumers and businesses to pay for consumption of a service on demand.
The cloud's capacity for storing and processing Big Data is only limited by the infrastructure it sits on, explained Wood. While the technology can act as “friction”, extending the time it takes to move from an idea to a result, more powerful processors are helping to reduce this lag time, opening up new opportunities for a whole range of industries.
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| Mar 06, 2012 |
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Amazon Web Services has cut its prices for the 19th time in six years in a bid to fend off competition from the likes of Microsoft Azure and Rackspace.
"AWS works hard to lower our costs so that we can pass those savings back to our customers," the company said in a blog post late Monday. "We look to reduce hardware costs, improve operational efficiencies, lower power consumption and innovate in many other areas of our business so we can be more efficient."
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| Mar 06, 2012 |
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Amazon has reduced the prices of four of the core components of its Amazon Web Services cloud. The price cut, announced on Monday evening, marks the 19th price cut in Amazon Web Services's six years of existence and is designed to lower the costs of growing an AWS deployment. Prices have been reduced for elastic compute cloud (EC2) rentable instances; the relational database service (RDS); Hadoop-variant Elastic MapReduce; and ElastiCache.
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| Mar 03, 2012 |
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INSIDE a remote mountain in Texas, a gargantuan clock is being pieced together, capable of telling the time for the next 10,000 years. Once the clock is finished, people willing to make the difficult trek will be able to visit the vast chamber housing it, along with displays marking various anniversaries of its operation. On a website set up to track the progress of this “10,000-year clock”, Jeff Bezos, who has invested $42m of his own money in the project, describes this impressive feat of engineering as “an icon for long-term thinking”.
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| Feb 23, 2012 |
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Amazon Web Services keeps building its Cloud Computing offer and launches Amazon Simple Workflow Service for the management, coordination and automation of flows.
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| Feb 09, 2012 |
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Agencies should look for storage providers that support their security and privacy requirements as they move data into cloud infrastructures, an industry expert with Amazon Web Services advises.
The duplication of data across multi-tenant environments will be a growing concern for agencies moving big storage to the cloud.
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| Feb 07, 2012 |
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Amazon.com Inc. lowered rates on computer storage it rents over the Internet, as the company applies its strategy of aggressive pricing to cloud computing.
The Seattle-based company cut its price plans by more than 10% for the first 500 terabytes of data that customers store in Amazon’s Internet-based S3 service, which is used for hosting media, backing up files and storing data for businesses to analyze. A terabyte is double the amount of space on a typical laptop computer’s hard drive.
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| Feb 02, 2012 |
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“Forrester regards Hadoop as the nucleus of the next-generation EDW in the cloud. Hadoop implements the core features that are at the heart of most modern EDWs: cloud-facing architectures, MPP, in-database analytics, mixed workload management, and a hybrid storage layer. Essentially, application development and business process professionals should regard today’s Hadoop market as the reinvention of the EDW for the new age of cloud-centric business models that require rapid execution of advanced, embedded analytics against big data. In Forrester’s 15-criterial evaluation of enterprise Hadoop solution providers, Forrester found that in the Leaders category, Amazon Web Services lead the pack due to its proven, feature-rich Elastic MapReduce subscription service.”
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| Jan 25, 2012 |
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Amazon just made life a little harder for old-line computer companies, by making a play for their data storage backup business.
The bookseller’s Amazon Web Services company has announced a service that will enable businesses to move their data to Amazon’s data centers more easily than before. The AWS Storage Gateway, as it is called, is software that customers install into their own computers to connect securely with Amazon’s storage cloud, and securely send to AWS copies of corporate data to encrypted files.
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| Jan 18, 2012 |
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Amazon Web Services has again delivered key technology to keep itself ahead of the cloud computing pack with a new high-performance, highly scalable NoSQL database service known as DynamoDB.
AWS quietly keeps delivering new capabilities that help its customers out of jams and continue to confound its competitors. Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides extremely fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability, said Adam Selipsky, vice president of marketing, sales, product management and support at AWS.
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| Jan 17, 2012 |
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Guest post written by Werner Vogels
Werner Vogels is chief technology officer of Amazon Web Services.
Cloud computing is disrupting the traditional way of doing business and the old way of thinking. As the cloud continues to level the playing field for businesses large and small, we are seeing fast adoption that has helped to unleash great ideas and innovations by organizations from start-ups to large outfits. There are a few trends that are driving change and solving real world problems in a different way.
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| Jan 10, 2012 |
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MSD, the result of the merger between Merck Sharp & Dohme with Schering-Plough, has launched a collaborative cloud-based: the MSD InteracTV, video-sharing platform aimed at doctors who have a relationship with the company.
Paulo Amaral, head of the area of multi-channel marketing at Merck, said that, after the merger, the company felt the need to establish dialogue with its various audiences, including physicians. "We did a survey and found that most doctors prefer to receive information on video," he explains.
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| Jan 03, 2012 |
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Haven Power is taking advantage of the lower costs and increased flexibility of cloud computing, as Paul Armstrong explains.
Cloud computing is a concept that many in the utility sector will not yet have experienced first hand. Cloud services were developed as a way to offer companies computing resources on a pay-as-you-go basis. It provides alternatives to onsite hardware because companies can get the computing resources they need on demand over the internet. This allows them to turn on computing power when they need it and turn it off when they don't, optimizing the cost model based on demand. Nor do they have to spend time on maintaining computer hardware. They can focus their resources on serving their customers and using technology to help their companies grow. Haven Power is one of the first energy companies to make use of the cloud.
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