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Designed By Templatoid - Powered By 45SHARESSHARE TWEET SHARE SHARE 0 COMMENTS Microsoft and 21Vianet, a provider of carrier neutral data center services in China, have extended their cloud partnership. 21Vianet will continue to offer Microsoft’s cloud in China, including Azure and Office 365 in China for an additional 4 years under the new agreement. 21Vianet acts as an operation entity for Azure, hosting Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure services and Office 365 in its data centers and handling customer relationships. A renewal agreement extends this setup to 2018 and suggests the partnership is bearing fruit for both companies. 21vianet-to-operate-azure-cloud-in-china-into-2018 Microsoft first partnered with 21Vianet a few years ago in a bid to extend its cloud in China via a local partner. China represents a huge growth market for Chinese and foreign cloud providers, but navigating the market isn’t simple for an outsider. In November 2012, Microsoft, 21Vianet, and the Shanghai Municipal Government announced a strategic partnership agreement in which Microsoft licensed the technology know-how and rights to operate and provide Office 365 and Windows Azure services in China to 21Vianet. “Since 2012, teams from Microsoft and 21Vianet have worked diligently and seamlessly in the preparation, public preview, and commercial launch of both Windows Azure and Office 365 services in China,” said Josh Chen, CEO of 21Vianet, in a press release. Several Chinese tech giants, including software developer Kingsoft, invested $300 million in 21Vianet last year. The investment is going toward expanding its data center footprint in a bid to capture the burgeoning Chinese cloud and data center services market. Some of those data centers have been built specifically in support of Microsoft. In 2013, it added a 5,000-cabinet facility in support of Azure. “We remain firmly committed to the Chinese cloud market, and we believe this extended partnership with 21Vianet will serve as a strong foundation for both companies to further contribute to the development of the cloud computing ecosystem throughout China,” said Ralph Haupter, vice president and CEO for Microsoft Greater China, in a press release. There are several regulatory compliance needs to get within what many dub as “The Great Firewall of China.” Officially called the Golden Shield Project, it is essentially an internet surveillance and censorship system that makes it hard to serve Chinese customers from outside. The market remains a separate entity in need of being served from within, and the typical path for a foreign company has been to partner with a local service provider. Amazon Web Services launched a Chinese region through ChinaNetCenter. Apple stores local iCloud data in China Telecom data centers. Several new data center builds have been announced in China recently, including by NTT and CenturyLink, which has launched a data center in Shanghai. Big recent news was a Distributed Denial of Service attack originating in China hit the popular open source code repository GitHub. The DDos attack against GitHub followed an attack on Greatfire.org, following a Wall Street Journal article about anti-censorship groups using U.S. cloud computing services to circumvent blocking by Chinese authorities. Amazon Web Services introduced new dense-storage instances for its EC2 cloud meant for processing multi-terabyte data sets. The new D2 instances provide additional compute power and memory compared to HS1 instances as well as ability to sustain high rates of sequential disk I/O for access to extremely large data sets (or, if you’re reading this 10 years from now, small data sets). People are getting comfortable with storing and processing larger amounts of data in the cloud, so instance sizes are growing in tow to handle more heavy-duty jobs. new-aws-instances-chew-through-very-large-data-sets The instances are based on Intel’s Haswell processors running at base clock frequency of 2.4 GHz. Each virtual CPU (vCPU) is a hardware hyperthread on an Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3 chip. The largest of the new instances are capable of providing up to 3,500 MB/second read and 3,100 MB/second write performance with Linux. new-aws-instances-chew-through-very-large-data-sets1 The largest instance also comes with bonus features of NUMA support and CPU power management. NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) allows specifying an affinity between an application and a processor that will result in use of memory that is “closer” to the processor and therefore more rapidly accessed. It’s possible to launch multiple D2 instances in a placement group (logical grouping of instances in single availability zone, meant for applications in need of low network latency, high network throughput or both). The D2 instances provide the best disk performance when you use a Linux kernel that supports Persistent Grants – an extension to the Xen block ring protocol that significantly improves disk throughput and scalability. Storage on D2 is local, so it’s advised to build redundancy in storage architecture and use a fault-tolerant file system. Each instance is EBS-optimized by default. “EBS” stands for “Elastic Block Storage.” Enhanced networking is available on D2, joining availability on C3, C4, and I2 families. Enabling enhanced networking results in higher performance (packets per second), lower latency, and lower jitter. “With Enhanced Networking and extremely high sequential high I/O rates, these instances will chew through your Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) data warehouse, log processing, and MapReduce jobs,” AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post. “They will also make great hosts for your network file systems and data warehouses.”Hybrid Cloud’s Need for Speed By admin on 21/08/2015 52SHARESSHARE TWEET SHARE SHARE 0 COMMENTS As more businesses are moving data to the cloud and outside of corporate walls, and more data is being generated via the Internet of Things (IoT), it’s turning into a hybrid world. Not only does data need to be put into context that crosses company and geographical boundaries, making for a distributed infrastructure, but the window of time when the magic must happen is also shrinking. hybrid-clouds-need-for-speed Data center provider Interxion, IBM, and big data platform Qubole are three very different providers and architects of the hybrid world. All are betting that agility and real-time needs will be a key driver in the transformation to hybrid. While cost savings is part of the hybrid story (optimizing what workloads go where based on cost), the bigger picture involves optimizing the user experience (maximizing what workloads go where based on provided value). Whether it be an employee with a back-office application, a developer in need of compute resources on the fly, or a consumer on a shopping spree, it all needs to happen in or near real time. Interxion views itself as building the railroad station hubs of the internet, having built data center infrastructure across Europe in all major metropolitan areas. It acts as an aggregation point for clouds, networks, and content. As a result, a new data center edge is arising, according to Ian McVey, director for enterprise and systems integrators for Interxion. As data and consumption become more distributed, data centers need to be closer to the end user and connections must be secure. IBM sees hybrid as the foundation for smarter apps, tapping richer data sets. Cloud means certain data is exposable. Its role is helping to connect these data clouds and putting that data in proper context with the right tools, as well as leveraging it in new contexts in order to build smarter applications. “Everything is becoming hybrid,” said IBM cloud CTO Danny Sabbah. “Businesses are looking at context-based, intelligent