Cloud Computing

This week I presented at the SSWUG Virtual Conference on how to benchmark your storage performance with Microsoft’s SQLIO utility.  Last week I talked about running SQL Server in the cloud on Amazon EC2.  Take those two things together, and we’ve got storage benchmarking on Amazon EC2 servers: Maximum write speed: 68 MBs/sec Maximum read…

Sometimes you need an offsite database server in case something goes wrong, but you can’t afford a full-blown disaster recovery datacenter.  Or maybe you’ve got some ideas that you’d like to try out with a big SQL Server 2005 box, but you don’t have the hardware sitting around idle.  Or maybe you’d just like to…

You can now spin up a virtual server in Amazon’s datacenter with Windows running. Even better, you can spin up a fresh new SQL Server for around $1 per hour. Amazon Web Services Blog announcement on Windows support Amazon EC2 description with Windows and SQL Server pricing And of course, this comes on a day…

A lot of cool things are happening at PDC this year, and Amazon’s already showing their cards: Amazon EC2 will offer Windows hosting. That means you can turn on a brand new Windows machine – or ten – and pay by the hour according to the capacity you’re using.  Less than a dollar an hour…

Amazon just announced EC2, their rent-a-datacenter plan. You build a custom virtual machine using their tools, and upload it to them. Then you can turn on that virtual machine anytime you want for a whopping ten cents per hour. It gets even better – if you have scalability needs, like if your site suddenly becomes…