eBay, Dell, HP Get Microsoft's Azure ''Appliance''
Microsoft's is introducing an Azure "appliance" that will first be used publicly by eBay, and sold by the likes of Dell and HP.
eBay said Monday that it will be one of Microsoft's first customers to use the new Windows Azure platform appliance for cloud computing. The Windows Azure platform appliance is the first turnkey cloud platform that customers can deploy--in their own datacenter--across hundreds to thousands of servers. The platform appliance includes Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and a Microsoft-specified configuration of network, storage and server hardware.
"Microsoft’s focus on and investment in the Windows Azure platform appliance shows they are committed to world-class cloud computing solutions," said James Barrese, eBay vice president of technology. "eBay has the right blueprint for next-generation software-as-a-service-based applications with our platform’s architecture, scale and reliability. Joint engineering on the Windows Azure platform appliance with eBay’s massive, high-volume systems allows Microsoft to demonstrate its leadership in this space and helps eBay improve our user experience through a flexible, scalable and cost-effective solution."
HP also said that it plans to work with Microsoft on a Windows Azure platform appliance that will be managed by HP Converged Infrastructure on-premises (although customers will also have the option of using HP data center hosting services). The Converged Infrastructure for the Windows Azure platform appliance will include HP Networking and HP ProLiant servers, and could be deployed in HP Performance-Optimized Datacenters.
Dell is also jumping on the Azure bandwagon, adding Microsoft's new appliance to its current Dell Services Cloud. "The Windows Azure platform appliance will allow Dell to deliver private and public cloud services for Dell and its enterprise, public, small and medium-sized business customers," the company said. "Dell will also work with Microsoft to develop a Dell-powered Windows Azure platform appliance for enterprise organizations to run in their data centers."
to learn more about the Windows Azure platform appliance, head here.
Yes there is at least one: my hard drive failed this Saturday night, thank god for flicker, else I would have lost years of collected photos (call me sloppy for not having backups, but who does have backups for everything)
I'm happy to have my bookmarks out there, my feeds also, my picture too, my games (steam), It means I can never loose by means of a unfortunate hard drive failure anymore.
I know I's not ideal, but it's definitely convenient.
YES but what if theres a fire...the backup drive would die too
I trust myself, I don't trust the cloud. They could have disasters, policy changes, whatever and decide to erase your data without you knowing it. I at least have control over how many backups I make and where I put them for safe storage.
And that is where I tell all my business friends, "Get two backups, Swap them every week, and put the backup in a firesafe."
Or hell, just invest in those USB firesafes. USB cord goes into a firesafe, data stays safe up to the rating of the safe.
There are definetly pros to cloud computing but cons outweigh the pros by a lot.
scalability has always been an issue, and the only fix was to throw more money at it (buy more servers). with a cloud infrastructure, you should theoretically be able to get more serving power out of less hardware. buuuut, it could also lead to developers becoming lazy, and performance dropping in applications... which would go down the 'throw money at it' spiral...
that, and i don't know how big of a pain maintaining azure would be... microsoft's products are quite notorious for requiring a lot of maintenance... hopefully an open source solution will step up to take on azure... the current issue is sql... >_
I have a firesafe, cost a lot less than a new hard drive too, also keeps my passport and other important documents safe. Buy one, pop a USB 2TB HDD in it, sync up photos and other irreplaceable things periodically. Hell, buy several, if you lose your original PC in a fire and buy a new one it will still be quicker to transfer the stuff from the one in the safe by USB than it would be to download it from the Cloud.
/soapbox