Posted by Alisher Yuldashev on Feb 10, 2010
There are a lot of discussions going on in the Internet regarding whether we can trust third parties to look after our data. I am not going to add fuel to the fire. I am going to show you how simple it is to backup an Oracle database to the Storage Cloud using the Oracle Secure Backup (OSB) Cloud Module.
First, you need to sign up for an Amazon S3 account and get an Access Key ID and a Secret Access Key. Check AWS pricing first.
Next, download the OSB Cloud Module and unzip it. Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Keith Murphy on Nov 4, 2008
For those of you who have been under a rock for the last several years, there is a buzz-phrase floating around—cloud computing. If you haven’t been paying attention, it is time to wake up.
While I could spend an entire blog post—if not several—on a definition of cloud computing, I will be talking only about cloud computing in the sense of companies moving servers from their building or network operations center to running virtual servers in this computing cloud.
While there are a number of companies providing virtual servers, the most visible is Amazon, with their Amazon Web Services (AWS). I will be talking about AWS in this post as it is the service with which I am most familiar. It seems like every month, AWS rolls out new options and services. Just recently Amazon announced that you can now run on AWS the Windows operating system along with SQL Server.
Amazon also announced a service level agreement (SLA) of 99.5%. The SLA is important. It is a guarantee of service uptime. If Amazon don’t meet the SLA, then you get money back. As any of you will know, you have to be able to count on your data center. 99.5% is a pretty good level of coverage.
Beyond that, one of the new features Amazon will be implementing during the next year is the use of regions and availability zones. Regions are distinctly different areas of a country (or completely separate countries); availability zones are designed to be insulated from failures in other availability zones and provide inexpensive, low-latency network connectivity to other availability zones in the same region. What does this mean? It will soon be very easy to deploy a set of servers in different areas and/or regions so that your data and servers are spread out and not vulnerable to a single point of failure.
I am not going to go into any detail about how virtual servers work. That’s not the point of this post. I am going to concentrate on what you can do with virtual servers.
Read the rest of this entry . . .
