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Vembu StoreGrid announce Cloud AMI (Amazon Machine Instance)

Hot on the heels of the RBS announcement of Amazon cloud compatibility, Vembu have announced  their integration. These announcements are not a reaction to each other but more evidence of a general shift to Amazon cloud compatibility.

The Vembu Technologies press release states “StoreGrid Cloud AMI would be instantiated in Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2)” and goes on to explain that “an Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) would be mounted as the back end storage for StoreGrid.”

These changes add another option regarding a way of doing things for service providers. Many, possibly most providers will retain their own private data centre space. Amazon comes with some advantages and possible disadvantages which in brief are as follows.

Possible advantages for service providers of using Amazon cloud computing integration.
1. Recognised international player storing data.
2. Very competitive pricing despite increases by most non Amazon data centres.
3. Amazon is a storage giant and partnership with them should bring efficiencies.
4. Guaranteed up-time.

Possible disadvantages for service providers using Amazon integration.
1. Significant dependence on one entity.
2. Entire business model based on Amazon system and pricing stability.
3. Somewhat complicated up and down transfer costs which are difficult to control.
4. Possible reduction in redundancy for providers going to the nth degree with own servers.
5. Geographic barriers regarding physical access to server instances. (virtual or real)
 
The upshot of all of this will be a new breed of online backup company. This will be the embodiment of a marketing company which focuses purely on selling while trusting Amazon to take care of everything else. The difficulty here will be service as such an entity may not be equipped to deal with emergency disaster recovery requests. In addition, with all the advantages of cloud computing and VMware, there is still the difficulty of the real level of support a company can provide if a mission critical system based thousands of miles away is down.

You can read more about VEMBU Technologies specific Amazon implementation plans on the Storegrid site.