Amazon's cloud storage hiccups
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Several companies lost access to their own files when Amazon.com Inc.'s pay-as-you-go data storage system went down Friday morning.
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Amazon.com Inc. AMZN.O on  Wednesday posted a quarterly profit that missed Wall Street  estimates and it unveiled a costly new shipping program that  heightened concern about falling margins, sending its shares  tumbling 14 percent.
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Web retailer Amazon.com Inc. launched its much-anticipated digital music store Tuesday with nearly 2.3 million songs, none of them protected against copying.
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(InfoWorld) - As Amazon.com Inc. trumpets its hosted IT infrastructure services, the Web site of its Alexa Internet division, responsible for some of the company's best known Web services for developers, has been experiencing serious availability and performance problems. Alexa's Web site has been down for over 18 hours this month, with the most serious problems experienced since Nov. 16, according to Pingdom, a Web site monitoring company based near Stockholm. For example, on Monday, the site was offline for 6 hours and 42 minutes, and already today (Wednesday), at press time, it had been unavailable for over 90 minutes, according to Pingdom's GIGRIB (Green is good, red is bad) service . Another monitoring company, Netcraft Ltd., also detected "significant" outages and delays at Alexa.com on Tuesday, which it detailed here . It isn't clear whether the problems are limited to Alexa's Web site or whether they have affected the online infrastructure it makes available to third-party developers. An Amazon.com spokesman couldn't immediately comment on the issue but said via e-mail he is looking into it. At least one user of an Alexa Web service hasn't been seriously affected by the downtime: Alexaholic.com , which lets its visitors, like webmasters, search engine marketers and publishers, contrast Web site traffic statistics on up to five domains at once. "We just wrap the Alexa graphs in a fast, Ajax interface, so we haven't been affected as much by Alexa's downtime. Occasionally I see a graph load a bit slowly, but overall it's not too bad," wrote Ron Hornbaker, founder of Alexaholic.com, in an e-mail interview. Hornbaker, in Kansas City, Missouri, speculates that the code that generates the Alexa graphs his Web site displays may run on different servers from the Alexa Web site. "Their graph servers are really outstanding, and it's a fantastic free service," he wrote. Still, the intensity and length of the performance problems affecting Alexa's Web site, as documented by Pingdom, are jarring at a time when Amazon.com's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jeff Bezos has heavily promoted the company's hosted IT infrastructure services for developers at public appearances and press interviews. BezosÂ sang the praises of Amazon servicesÂ like Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco two weeks ago and at the Emerging Technologies Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in September. S3 and EC2 have become quite popular because they let developers lease storage space and computing capacity from Amazon over the Web, providing them with an option to having to buy expensive hardware, Bezos has said. This month, BusinessWeek magazine ran a story about this topic and put Bezos on the cover. The Alexa division offers four hosted services designed to let developers build Web sites and applications based on Alexa's Web index and data. "Users can access Web site traffic data, related links, contact information, as well as a powerful search engine based on the Alexa crawl, and a wide variety of other functionality and data," according to a page on Amazon.com's Web site. With the improvements in storage and bandwidth, many are saying that the much-anticipated era of network computing is finally here, and that it is now finally feasible to provide, over the Internet, hosted storage, computing and application services. At the Web 2.0 Summit,Â Google CEO Eric Schmidt also championed the hosted, software-as-service model, calling it superior to the packaged software model upon which Microsoft Corp. built its empire. "Finally now the architecture works," he said. Google plays in the software-as-service software market with its word processing, calendaring, Web mail, wiki and spreadsheet hosted applications. Yet, Google has also at times disappointed users of its hosted applications. Users of Google's Blogger have recently complained about performance problems that have hobbled that popular blog hosting and authoring service. Likewise, Google Analytics suffered crippling performance problems when demand for it surged after Google made it a free service in November.
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It's the mid-1990s, gigabyte hard drives are starting to become commonplace, and that fact is great news for this pilot fish with a storage problem.
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(Source: Network Appliance)  Deduplication and other emerging storage optimization technologies help companies quickly drive down storage costs and simplify data storage management. Learn how you can: reduce storage capacity requirements by as much as 95%, implement deduplication transparently without affecting performance, and lower your total disk storage and data center costs.
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Plus, Amazon's broken heart, Microsoft's unearned revenue, and is PeopleSoft stronger?
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Device features two optical drives and a 160GB hard drive for storing content.
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Come Super Bowl Sunday, Amazon.com will get a leg up in the digital music race it's running against Apple Inc.'s iTunes Store.
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SEATTLE - News that Amazon.com Inc. and TiVo Inc. will soon let customers download movies from the Web to their set-top boxes shook up the stocks of companies involved in digital video services.
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Storage Expo Iomega punts a hard disk autoloader
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Amazon.com Inc.  on Wednesday posted a quarterly profit that missed Wall Street estimates and it unveiled a costly new shipping program that heightened concern about falling margins, sending its shares tumbling 14 percent.
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New drive crams enormous storage capacity into standard 3.5-inch format, but it's not ready for delivery just yet.
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Calls for proportional response Google has hit out at storage, memory and networking equipment makers with a grimace, a finger wag and a closing wallet.â¦
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Or at least neutralizes their hype The Storage Performance Council (SPC) has issued a second benchmark meant to save customers from vendor spin hell.â¦
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Web retailer Amazon.com Inc. launched its much-anticipated digital music store Tuesday with nearly 2.3 million songs, none of them protected against copying
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Got backup? How about a new 1-terabyte drive for $70 off the usual price?