Mind Infinity

Amazon S3 is a online storage service provided by Amazon. It is an internet storage system where you can achieve store images, web hosting, backup solution at a reasonable cost. It caters from small to enterprise business and it is widely popular.

The retrieval and pushing data is done using Web Services. they claim the service as high availability, highly reliably and scalable. Since it is using web services, web developers can extend the service to any platform easily and make services.

An example being a Image hosting service, a Travel Portal which contains lots of images, galleries etc can make use of Amazon S3 thus reducing the bandwidth costs, file serving requests to webserver.

Amazon S3 is made up of buckets and objects. All Objects are organized into Buckets and can assign a unique key and later can be retrieved by REST, SOAP or BitTorrent. Buckets and keys can be accessed by URLs.

To keep costs lower, many startups and small companies have embraced this platform thus reducing their costs. 37Signals.com uses S3 to store their data.

It can be used as a good backup tool for servers and also local machine and as it is internet based, can be accessed from anywhere in the world. Here is a list of amazon backup tools

S3 is very well documented. Smugmug a photo hosting service have posted amazon s3 savings in their blog. Amazon S3 can be accessed by web browser from this s3interface.com.

A popular service akamai is used for image hosting and many other types of storage, but when compared to amazon,amazon s3 is much cheaper in storage, when you have high bandwidth websites, you need to workout bandwidth costs against other services on the internet.

A new comer in Open Source World, a new ecommerce platform is released, It has been in beta for a while. Magento is completely modular and very flexible in its design and have lots of controls to tweak around.

It builds the a fully functional ecommerce website in minutes with nice templates and very easier admin interface unlike the other popular open source software such as OSCommerce/Zencart which usually needs lots of tweaking with admin interface and templates.

In my initial testing, I found Magento to run slow when compared to other, I believe it is due to the framework they have adapted. A tour is in their website

It can also run as a single CMS for multiple websites which is easier to setup.

There are lots of developers and community has been developed during the beta. It is going to fun implementing this new system. Lots of features were included in the system which should be easier to setup a basic portal and can be customized to an enterprise level.

Adobe Launched Adobe Media Player which allows you put all shows which are available in the internet and put it in your playlist and play at your convenience.

Adobe consolidated a catalog for leading media companies. It can automatically download the episodes in the background and let you view anytime you want.

Adobe worked a lot in designing the interface which has search and many other customizing features. This is another tough competition to itunes and Windows Media player. Due to Adobe’s partnership with media companies, it can have better content.

Content Owners can white label their content. Player works in both Windows and Mac as it is a browser based application, A powerful browser based application is launched by Adobe last month which is Photoshop Express is also a big step in web environment for media.

Virtualization works like, virtual hardware and other resources are created to run different operating systems simultaneously, like you are working on a real computer. However in an enterprise due to lack of resources on one server, many servers can operate at one time to give available resources.

With Virtualization getting popular among enterprises, IT infrastructure needs to be updated accordingly. Security is also a big concern. Network Topologies needs to be upgraded. It is going to be a popular culture soon in networks.

Citrix recently acquired XenSource which can deliver end to end virtualization providing server, application and desktop virtualization.

A similar functionality is also provided by VMWare through their VMotion, This can create a seamless operation with very less downtime which has live migration capabilities.

A Simple chart from VMWare

Other Virtualization resources:

http://www.vyatta.com/products/virtualization.php

http://www.virtualbox.org/
- Open Source for different operating systems including OS X

Some vendors and products providing this type of virtualization include Microsoft Virtual Server, SWSoft Virtuozzo, Parallels Workstation/Desktop, Linux jails, and Sun Solaris containers.

More FAQ about Virtualization

A video on Cisco Nexus 5000 which enabled Virtualization Optimization

Google launched their new version of Google Earth Today. This version is more involved in 3d Modelling of the Earth.

More enhancements in terms of navigation, zoom controls, languages are introduced.
With KML being made as a new international standard by Open Geospatial Consortium, they will take responsibility of maintain and extending it. By this, KML is going to be a popular standard in terms of mapping.

Checkout this video