Sonian Hosted Archiving Services » Cloud Compute

Cloud Infrastructure Expands into Asia

Greg Arnette — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:33:10 +0000

AWS has announced an expansion of its services into an Asia-Pacific region in the first half of 2010, enabling businesses to deploy compute and storage resources in close proximity to their end-users in the region.

Sonian will access AWS’s infrastructure services from multiple Availability Zones in Singapore in the first half of 2010, then in other Availability Zones within Asia over the second half of 2010.

Cisco Offers Comprehensive SaaS Collaboration

Greg Arnette — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 14:30:27 +0000

Over the past 2 years Cisco has been acquiring companies in the messaging and collaboration space. The individual companies are all interesting and successful businesses, and now Cisco has combined them into a new SaaS collaboration service called WebEx Mail which feature-wise looks to compete head on with Google Apps and Hosted Exchange.

For $5 per user per month you get 35 Gb of storage, Outlook connector and a AJAXy web UI plus Ironport email security. This new offering will be an interesting platform to watch and see if Cisco can win collaboration business away from Microsoft, IBM, Novell and Google.

Sonian will provide hosted archiving services for this new platform.

Cloud Infrastructure Achieves SAS70 Type II Certification

Greg Arnette — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:27:01 +0000

Congratulations to Amazon Web Services for finalizing Statement on Auditing Standards No. 70 (SAS70) Type II Audit, and has obtained a favorable unbiased opinion from its independent auditors.

SAS70 certifies that AWS has had an in-depth audit of its controls, specifically as it relates to operational performance and security to safeguard customer data. All Sonian customers benefit from this attention to security and operating efficiency.

Sonian GroupWise Archving Saves NKF Storage Costs

Greg Arnette — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:41:05 +0000

National Kidney Foundation cuts GroupWise storage with cloud storage email archiving. Search Storage reports that NKF is saving money on email storage with the Sonian Archive hosted service.

Hosted archiving does not require any on-premises hardware or software, and enables the IT department to focus on other projects without worrying about email retention and long term storage.

Xconomy: Cloud Compute Panel features Greg Arnette from Sonian

Greg Arnette — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:42:29 +0000

Xcellent! Wade Rousch at Xconomy has extended an invitation to participate in the panel discussion for Xconomy Forum: Cloud^3 — Cloud Computing Goes Exponential

I and Sonian board member John Landry will join other technologists and entrepreneurs to talk about cloud computing’s impact on the IT climate for startups, small and medium-sized businesses, large enterprises, and consumers. Register to attend this event as well as Cloud Camp at the link above.

Goldman Report: Cloud Enablers Will Win IT Budget Dollars

Greg Arnette — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:34:53 +0000

This week’s Goldman Sachs Report “A Paradigm Shift for IT: The Cloud,” gives us a view into IT decision maker attitudes about cloud computing and where enterprise workloads will be processed in the future.

Over the next three years a majority of compute workloads will migrate from non-cloud on-premises infrastructure to a hybrid public/private cloud ecosystem. Cloud means scale up in real-time to process data and then scale down when the work is done. No wasted compute power sitting idle.

The winners will be the companies that early on figured out how to harness the cloud infrastructure as a service for SaaS delivery and those that provide enabling technologies to help IT buyers get more value for their IT budget dollars. Sonian’s Universal Data Management cloud-powered platform is one such example of putting the cloud to good use today, solving the information governance pain point in a modern, secure, reliable and efficient manner.

Interesting Number of the Week: 50,000

Greg Arnette — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:27:48 +0000

RightScale has published their estimates of daily EC2 launches. It’s really impressive to see these stats and know that Sonian is contributing to the cloud-scale initiative. Organizations of all sizes can benefit from “cloud bursting” capabilities when extra CPU is needed to process big data sets. Virtual Private Cloud techniques enable on-demand cloud infrastructure to be a virtual extension of an enterprise data center without sacrificing security.

The "Cloud" has a Hard-Core Center

Greg Arnette — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:58:55 +0000

This is as serious as serious gets with regard to universal data management – cloud style.

The term “cloud computing” may connote the feeling of “soft and airy” but at the center of every credible cloud infrastructure is state of the art hardware and software with two prime directives: Never lose any data and provide non-stop access.

Billions of dollars have been invested by cloud “infrastructure as a service” companies to meet these objectives. But if the cloud is going to be successful it’s important the end consumer, namely the IT decision maker, understand the benefits of “why use cloud” for Tier 3 archival storage.

Universal data archival storage is perfect for the cloud because:

Human generated content is growing faster and faster in volume and size each year
This content is unstructured and does not keep well in a relational database
Searching across “big data” archives can scale up in the cloud using map-reduce frameworks
Cloud-powered SaaS archival systems can keep your data safer than on-premise by eliminating physical access and tampering

Shards of Content Need Centralized Information Governance

Greg Arnette — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:02:00 +0000

Overflowing in-boxes, maxed out email servers, and now even more places for employees to generate content. Enterprises are implementing new collaboration systems (Sharepoint, GDocs, ZoHo) for document sharing, which means employees will have more options beyond email to collaborate internally with each other and externally with customers, vendors, friends & family.

These new capabilities mean there are growing “shards of content” data silos in the enterprise that need to be captured and archived for compliance, e-discovery, storage management and universal information governance best practices.

Sonian believes the best most cost-effective and reliable way to solve this problem is a centralized archiving service, powered by cloud-scale infrastructure as a service. Here’s why:

Installed archiving software never has enough compute power for large searches or deep analytics. The cloud offers CPU on demand to power through terabytes of content.
Installed archiving software consumes a lot of your expensive SAN and backup/DR storage. The cloud as your long-term storage locker with integrated search and analytics is configured as a virtual extension of your own network. A double Win-Win combination: less cost and just as secure.
Installed archiving software can’t help you gain valuable data insights to manage “top-line-growth” issues from better business intelligence and value that can be extracted from all content silos across the organization.

Interesting number of the week: 5 million

Greg Arnette — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 15:55:00 +0000

Sonian manages “big data” using cloud-powered SaaS technologies designed to capture all your universal data. The cloud and big data are the perfect match for use case needs and cloud state of the art.

Periodically we’ll post interesting statistics about the cloud, universal data management, and where Sonian sees all this new technology heading.

This week’s interesting number: 5 Million.

In the Fall of 2009 an estimated 5 million students returned to educational institutions that migrated their collaboration systems (email, IM, etc.) to a cloud-powered hosted service.