Back in November of 2008 I did an article awhile back on a way to use Amazon’s S3 to hook into Final Cut Server. At the time though, S3 had a pretty big limitation in that it wasn’t really suitable for backing up large video files as an archive device for Final Cut Server. But today, Amazon announced that S3 now supports files of up to 5 terabytes using multipart upload (previously the maximum file size was 5 gigabytes). This finally means that files do not have to be broken up at the file system layer in order to back up to Amazon’s cloud. However, this does not mean that…
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iPad + Box.net = Win
Box.net is a cloud-based file sharing service that I used extensively in my last book. Similar to dropbox.com, Box.net allowed my publishers and I to automate our workflow with regard to the publishing process, but more importantly, I was actually able to do much of the review and exchange of files from the iPad, which was really nice given that the book was on iOS. I’ve been working with a few companies over the past few weeks on coming up with various strategies for cloud interoperability, and Box.net has come up a few times in this regard. Looks like I’m not the only one!
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NAS, Clouds & Backup
NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices are a popular alternative to providing centralized file services to smaller environments. This includes devices such as the Seagate BlackArmor, the DroboShare NAS and the Netgear ReadyNAS Pro. These are inexpensive as compared to an actual server, they require less management and they often come with some pretty compelling features. But one of the primary reasons to buy a NAS can end up being a potential pain point as well: they require less management than a server because they can’t do as much as a server can. For example, the option to replicate between two of them. Most have NAS to NAS replication built in. However, that…
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Using Microsoft Document Connection on a Mac
Microsoft released Service Pack 2 to Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac earlier this week. Once you have installed Service Pack 2 you may notice the new Open from Document Connection File menu item for office applications, or you may notice the new application called Microsoft Document Connection located in your /Applications/Microsoft Office 2008 folder. These are all part of Microsoft’s overall Software+Services strategy: provide a cloud type of environment that is able to sustain the software that you purchase from them. In this case it could be a private document storage “cloud” running on a SharePoint server or it could be a more public environment running in the Office Live…
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TextEdit for the Web
These days it seems like there’s a low-cost or free alternative to everything up on the web/in the clouds. This could be something like gMail for email, OpenDNS for DNS or even one of the many sites that provides users with file storage. Now enter j.otdown.com. Using this service you can type text to your hearts content. When you stop typing a url will be generated and automatically saved. You can then use that URL to revisit your document at a later time. You can also use the Share button to then email the link to others. For example, this document was created and shared by yours truly. It’s got…
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Google Outage
When a large company loses email and other services the help desk is abuzz with calls. But who do you call when an outsourced vendor goes down? I’ve read a number of reports about the Google outage from a few days ago. Having millions of users without service, or with deprecated service, is a lot of potential calls. Just like tens of thousands in an enterprise is lot when those users cannot access email. In the reports I’ve read people were taking a very strong stance on the outage, not necessarily with Google directly, but identifying cloud support options across the board as having “no one to call.” Really? There’s…
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Xsan TCO
I recently read an article in CIO magazine about the cost per gig per month. In the article they quoted Google at about 6 cents per gig per month. I use Amazon for a few projects, which runs at about 12 cents per gig per month. Including labor and hardware I decided to look at about what it would cost per gigabyte per month for Xsan storage. Averaging out 30 installs that we did over the past year turned out a total of about 7.2 cents per gig per month, as opposed to around $2.00 per gig per month which is pretty average for many SAN solutions. Now, Xsan…
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Mac in the Cloud
A few days ago I noticed a post in Tim O’Reilly’s twitter feed asking whether or not it would matter whether people ran a Mac or a PC once everyone had migrated to a cloud. Well, there are a few things about Mac OS X that make it fairly difficult to run in a cloud environment: EFI – Mac OS X doesn’t use a BIOS like most Operating Systems. This makes the bootup process fairly difficult in a distributed computing environment where the Guest OS would be OS X and the Host OS would be something else. Lack of Firepower – I love the Xserve. I always have. They’re some…
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Google Video from Faculty Summit on Computing at Scale