This morning, Amazon took a step with EC2 that many had long anticipated: They announced spot pricing for cloud compute instances . EC2 customers can now name their own price, and Amazon will bring compute instances up at variable discount prices according to these "bids". This complements...

As discussed last week, cloud storage solutions differ in many ways . They can be defined by their pricing model (usage-based or capitalized), their location (on-site or off-site), the granularity of scalability (per-file, standard unit, or per-system), and whether or not they are multi-tenant. But one...

The current economic climate is pushing many to look for current-year budget savings. This is one of the major reasons that cloud computing in general, and cloud storage specifically, has become so attractive. Moving data into the cloud doesn't just get it out of the data center, it converts a capital...

James Urquhart of CNET recently asked about the service levels offered by cloud computing providers . He suggested that many don’t meet the basic needs of enterprise customers in a number of areas, being mainly “self-service”. Even the supposed premium support offered by many isn’t up to the standards...

Enterprise storage is at a crossroads. For a decade, IT organizations have been creating independent groups to oversee the various infrastructure components they are charged with managing: Server, network, storage, database, data center, backup, desktop, mainframe. This made sense, since each discipline...