Amazon Adds Per-Second Billing for Some EC2 Instances

Amazon’s per-second billing is now available for some types of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. Announced back in September, this billing model change went into effect on 2 October.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) first launched their EC2 service in 2006. The success of AWS and cloud computing in general proves that there are uses for leasing a virtual server for an hour at a time.

Recently, some AWS competitors have moved from per-hour to per-minute billing. This move by AWS seems like an attempt to leapfrog past their competitors by offering billing that’s even more granular. In this post, I’ll look into some of the details of this billing change. Continue reading

Avere Announces Software Updates, Adds Virtual FXT Filer

Today Avere Systems announced an update to the AOS software (version 4.5) that runs on their FXT Edge Filers. The big news in this version is the addition of a Virtual Edge Filer, the vFXT.

Avere’s FXT works by placing an Edge Filer close to the end-user clients. The Edge Filer uses a global name space to virtualize file storage for the Core Filers positioned behind it. AOS 4.0 included support for using public cloud storage as a Core Filer, or Cloud NAS. AOS 4.5 adds support for installing an Edge Filer in the cloud, further extending the functionality. Continue reading