Microsoft Azure overtakes Amazon's cloud in performance test

Azure's cloud is faster at uploading and downloading files to the cloud, Amazon still more scalable, storage provider Nasuni finds

Microsoft Azure's cloud outperformed Amazon Web Services in a series of rigorous tests conducted by Nasuni, a storage vendor that annually benchmarks cloud service providers (CSPs).

Nasuni uses public cloud resources in its enterprise storage offering, so each year the company conducts a series of rigorous tests on the top CSPs' clouds in an effort to see which companies offer the best performing, most reliable infrastructure. Last year, Amazon Web Services' cloud came out on top, but this year Microsoft Azure outperformed AWS in performance and reliability measures. AWS is still better at handling extra-large storage volumes, while Nasuni found that the two OpenStack powered clouds it tested -- from HP and Rackspace -- were lacking, particularly at larger scales.

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Nasuni conducted the tests on five of the largest CSPs: Azure, AWS, HP, Rackspace and Google Cloud. A write/read/delete test determined how effective each provider was at uploading data of various sizes (between 1KB and 1GB) to its cloud, recalling the randomly generated file and deleting it. Microsoft Azure was 56% faster than AWS S3 when it came to writing data into its cloud, and 39% faster when reading data.

Another test measured how reliable the clouds were by conducting a read/write/delete every minute for a month straight and determining how consistent the process is when repeated that many times. Azure was 25% faster on average compared to AWS S3 when performing a repetitive task every 60 seconds for 30 days.

A third test measured how the clouds handled increasingly larger file sizes being continuously uploaded to its cloud. AWS came out on top in that test with a variance of 0.6% as larger and larger files were placed into its cloud, with Azure coming in a close second with a 1.9% variance. The OpenStack-powered clouds were not as reliable when scaled up to extremely large file storage, with HP and Rackspace's cloud having variance levels of 23.5% and 26.1% respectively.

This is the second year in a row that Nasuni has conducted the tests and the year-over-year change in the results shows how rapidly the industry is evolving. Last year Nasuni anointed AWS as the top cloud provider with Microsoft Azure in a close second, but both providers had enough errors and performance issues that Nasuni did not consider them mature enough for use in enterprise storage solutions.

Microsoft has made significant investments to beef up its Azure cloud in the past year, though, including expanding it from a platform as a service (PaaS)-focused offering for application developers to now being an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) where compute and storage resources can be rented by the hour. Microsoft even started offering Linux virtual machines in its cloud.

"CSPs tested this year demonstrated clear advancements over last year, including improved performance and fewer errors," the report states. "It is clear that the minimum bar is moving upward, which is excellent news for the cloud storage market as a whole. As more CSPs mature into enterprise-class cloud storage providers, organizations and vendors will be able to leverage competitive advancements in price and technology to improve their overall storage infrastructure."

Based on the findings of the report, Nasuni uses both Azure and AWS public cloud resources as part of the company's enterprise storage offering. The company specializes in a globally distributed unified storage offering that combines both hardware on-premises and in the cloud to provide a centrally managed international storage system, with mobile access. Nasuni makes the report available for users who register on the company's site.

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Cisco puts a huge value on the 'Internet of everything

More devices and people connecting to the Internet will create $14.4 trillion opportunity over the next decade, the company says


The so-called "Internet of everything," the rapidly approaching world where objects from refrigerators to factory robots can talk to people and other machines, will create a massive business opportunity worth $14.4 trillion over the next decade, according to a new study from Cisco Systems.

The Internet of everything, a phrase coined by Cisco to describe the networking of people, processes, data and objects, will encompass multiple industries, enabling customized online education, smart factories and the smart energy grid, Cisco officials said. Over the next decade, that connection of new objects and people to the Internet puts $14.4 trillion at stake, with the opportunity including new profits and cost savings, the company predicted in the white paper, released late Monday.



More than 99 percent of physical objects are not now connected to the Internet, but Cisco expects 50 billion objects to be connected by 2020, officials said. New objects and people coming online creates a big investment incentive for companies, said Cisco Chief Marketing Officer Blair Christie.

Companies should embrace this trend or risk being left behind, Cisco CEO John Chambers wrote in a blog post.

"I believe that businesses and industries that quickly harness the benefits of the Internet of Everything will be rewarded with a larger share of that increased profitability," he wrote. "This will happen at the expense of those that wait or don't adapt effectively. That's why the value is 'at stake' -- it's truly up for grabs."

The Internet of everything represents the next stage of the Internet, Christie said. "We think it's as powerful as [the Internet] was in the very beginning, when a lot of industries won and a lot of industries lost," she said.

Cisco looked at several industries to come up with its money estimate. Among the industries: smart buildings, smart farming, investing, physical and IT security, connected payments, and connected gaming and entertainment. In addition, the company looked at a handful of cross-industry trends that the Internet of everything will affect, with telecommuting, travel avoidance and supply-chain efficiency among them.

Just under a third of the market opportunity for the Internet of everything will be in the U.S., with another 30 percent in Europe, Cisco predicted. Another 12 percent will be in China and 5 percent in Japan.

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Internet Explorer only? IE doubt it

Fewer businesses standardizing browser use on Internet Explorer, but the practice isn't gone yet.

Just as Internet users in general have defected in huge numbers from Microsoft Internet Explorer over the past several years, the business world, as well, is becoming less dependent on the venerable browser.

Companies that used to mandate the use of IE for access to web resources are beginning to embrace a far more heterodox attitude toward web browsers. While it hasn't gone away, the experience of having to use IE 6 to access some legacy in-house web app is becoming less common.

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"Things have changed a lot in the last three years, and I think a lot of it has to do with the emergence of the modern web and the popularity of mobile. They have made it very different for companies to truly standardize on a browser," says Gartner Research analyst David Mitchell Smith.

One example of the changing face of business browser use is SquareTwo Financial, a Denver-based financial services company that works primarily in distressed asset management. The firm's 280 employees handle both consumer and commercial business, buying and selling debt, and a franchise program means that there are upwards of 1,500 more people working at SquareTwo affiliates. According to CTO Chris Reigrut, the company takes in roughly $280 million in annual revenue.

"In addition to buying and selling debt, we also provide a software-as-a-service platform that our franchises (and we) use to actually negotiate and litigate the debt," he tells Network World.

Square Two hasn't needed to standardize, he says, because keeping their offerings diverse is part of the idea - the company's various online resources all have differing requirements.

"We do distribute Firefox on Windows systems - however, Safari and IE are both frequently used. Our internal wiki is only officially supported on Firefox and Safari. Our SaaS 'client' is a pre-packaged Firefox install so that it looks more like a traditional thick-client application. Most of our employees use their browser for a couple of internal systems, as well as several external services (i.e. HR, training, etc)," says Reigrut (who, like the other IT pros quoted in this story is a member of the CIO Executive Council Pathways program for leadership development).

The Microsoft faithful, however, are still out there. Many businesses have chosen to remain standardized on IE, for several reasons. SickKids, a children's research hospital in Toronto, sticks with Microsoft's browser mostly for the ease of applying updates.

"We have more than 7,000 end-point devices. Most of those devices are Windows workstations and Internet Explorer is included as part of the Microsoft Windows operating system. As such, this makes it easier and integrates well with our solution to manage and deploy upgrades, patches and hotfixes to the OS including IE," says implementations director Peter Parsan.

"Internet Explorer is more than a browser, it is the foundation for Internet functionality in Windows," he adds.

[MORE INTERNET EXPLORER: Internet Explorer flaws fixed by Microsoft Patch Tuesday updates]

The complexity of managing an ecosystem with more than 100 types of software - running the gamut from productivity applications to clinical programs - requires a heavily controlled approach, according to Parsan.

Smith agrees that IE still has its advantages for business users that want just such a strictly regimented technology infrastructure.

"If you want a managed, traditional IT environment ... really, your only option is Internet Explorer," he says, adding that both Firefox and Chrome lag behind IE in terms of effective centralized management tools.

Some companies, however, have gone a different way - standardizing not on IE, but on a competing browser.

Elliot Tally, senior director of enterprise apps for electronics manufacturer Sanmina, says his company's employees are highly dependent on browsers for business-critical activities. Everything from ERP to document control (which he notes is "big for a manufacturing company") to the supply chain is run from a web app.

Tally says Sanmina made the move to standardize on Chrome in 2009, in part because of a simultaneous switch to Gmail and Google Apps from IE and Microsoft products.

"It made sense to go with the browser created and supported by the company that created the apps we rely on. Also, Chrome installs in user space so it doesn't require admin privileges to auto-update," he says. "It also silently auto-updates, as opposed to Firefox, which requires a fresh install to update versions, or IE, which is similar. Chrome, over the last year or so, has supported web standards better than any other browser, and (until recently) has offered significantly better performance."

Plainly, broad diversity exists both in the actual browsers used by workers and the approaches businesses have taken in managing their use.

That diversity, says Smith, is the reason Gartner has been advising clients against standardization from the outset.

"Standardize on standards, not browsers," he urges. "That was a controversial position for 10 years. People really didn't agree with it, they didn't listen to it, and they paid the price."

Microsoft, as well, has had to pay a price.

"[Standardization] hurts Microsoft's reputation as an innovator; as a forward-thinker," he says. "When people's impression of using Microsoft technology - whether it's a browser, whether it's an operating system - is something that is two or three versions old, because they're dealing with it through what enterprises want."

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Internet Explorer 10 Release Preview for Windows 7 first-impressions review

When Microsoft first announced that Internet Explorer 10 would be part of Windows 8 most users assumed that this would also mean a release of the browser for the version 7 operating system. The first version of Internet Explorer 10 was released publicly with Windows 8's Developer Preview back in 2011, and then updated whenever new versions of preview builds released. Microsoft at that time was tight lipped about the future of IE10 for Windows 7

October 2012 came and brought along Windows 8's launch. It was in the week prior to the release of Windows 8 that the company shed some light on the future of IE10 for Windows 7. A blog post indicated that Microsoft had plans to release a preview version for Windows 7 in November 2012.

Internet Explorer 10 Preview for Windows 7 released today for 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the operating system, and for 64-bit editions of Windows Server 2008 R2.

System Requirements
32-bit or 64-bit edition of Windows 7 SP1 or 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
At least 512 Megabyte of RAM
At least 70 / 120 / 200 Megabyte of hard drive space
At least 1 GHz processor

Installation and uninstallation
The installation of Internet Explorer 10 Preview will replace the current version of the browser on the system. A restart is required before the new version becomes available.

Note that it is possible to uninstall IE10 again on a system it has been installed on. To uninstall the browser do the following:

Click on the Start button.
Type Programs and Features in the search box and select it from the results.
Select View installed updates from the sidebar.
Locate Windows Internet Explorer 10 under Microsoft Windows.
Right-click the entry and select uninstall.
Select Yes when prompted if you really want to uninstall the program.
Restart the PC right then or at a later point to complete the removal.

What's New
Internet Explorer 10 is nearly identical to the version of the browser that Microsoft released for Windows 8. The core difference: is: Adobe Flash is not natively integrated into the Windows 7 / Windows Server 2012 version.

Both Internet Explorer 10 versions on Windows 8 include a built-in version of Adobe Flash, which is especially important for the Modern UI version of the browser as it does not support browser plugins. Microsoft circumvented this restriction with the direct implementation of Flash in Internet Explorer 10.

Web standards support appears to be identical in both versions of IE10. The Internet Explorer blog notes that the following improvements have been made over previous versions of the browser:

Rich Visual Effects: CSS Text Shadow, CSS 3D Transforms, CSS3 Transitions and Animations, CSS3 Gradient, SVG Filter Effects

Sophisticated Page Layouts: CSS3 for publication quality page layouts and application UI (CSS3 grid, flexbox, multi-column, positioned floats, regions, and hyphenation), HTML5 Forms, input controls, and validation

Enhanced Web Programming Model: Better offline applications through local storage with IndexedDB and the HTML5 Application Cache; Web Sockets, HTML5 History, Async scripts, HTML5 File APIs, HTML5 Drag-drop, HTML5 Sandboxing, Web workers, ES5 Strict mode support.

The browser scores 320 and 6 points in the HTML5test, an indicator of how well browsers support the HTML5 standard. That's an increase of more than 200 points over Internet Explorer 9. IE10 is still trailing behind other browsers in the test. Google Chrome 23 for instance scores 448 + 13 points in the test, and Firefox 16 372 and 10.

Internet Explorer 10 is the first browser that ships with Do Not Track enabled by default. The feature informs websites and services the browser connects to that users do not want to be tracked. The default nature of the feature in IE10 has been controversially discussed as the Do No Track specification requires users to make the decision. Yahoo as a consequence announced that it would ignore Internet Explorer 10's Do Not Track header.

IE10 on Windows 7 may run faster than comparable web browsers in select benchmarks. Microsoft claims for instance that Internet Explorer 10 is two times as fast as Google Chrome 23 and 20 percent faster than Firefox 16 in the Mandelbrot benchmark available on Microsoft's Test Drive website.

The browser does not perform as well in other benchmarks. Its score of 5134 in Google's Octane benchmark is beaten by Firefox 19's 9031, and Google Chrome 23's 12975. Mozilla's Kraken benchmark paints a similar picture. Firefox and Google Chrome need roughly the same execution time of around 2200ms, while Internet Explorer 10 three times at much with 6800ms.

IE10 performs better when running applications and demos on Microsoft's Internet Explorer Test Drive site. It is somewhat surprising that Google Chrome usually comes in last in these benchmarks, while Internet Explorer 10 and Firefox finish in close proximity to each other.

Closing Words
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 10 as a preview version and it should be handled as such. While it is possible to uninstall the browser on the system to revert to the previous version of Internet Explorer, it is not suited for production environments, even though there does not appear to be any -- visible -- difference between the preview version for Windows 7 and the final version on Windows 8.

Microsoft managed to close a large part of the performance and web standards support gap between previous versions of Internet Explorer and third-party browsers such as Chrome, Firefox or Opera with the release of IE10.

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Internet Explorer flaws fixed by Microsoft Patch Tuesday updates

IE vulnerabilities offered hackers a one-two punch, expert says.

Microsoft says Internet Explorer versions 6 through 10 are subjects of two critical Patch Tuesday updates for February that could address recent Java woes.

Both critical patches address vulnerabilities that could give attackers access to client browsers and from there access to the underlying host, says Alex Horan a senior product manager at CORE Security. "Bulletins 1 and 2 target all versions of Internet Explorer on essentially all versions of Windows platforms, so it's pretty much one-hack fits all in the Windows environment for attackers," he says. "I expect a lot of interest in developing a working exploit for this vulnerability."

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Three less urgent patches ranked important could address flaws that enable the takeover of machines accessed via the Internet Explorer vulnerabilities, he says. "Bulletins 7, 8 and 9 seem to target the same underlying systems as Bulletins 1 and 2, which means hackers could phish users and then leverage 7, 8 and 9 to get system level control of their machines. That is essentially a worst case scenario and knockout punch for security personnel," Horan says.

Another security expert Paul Henry, a security and forensic analyst for Lumension, says the two critical Internet Explorer problems could be linked to Java. "It's possible that this is related to the recent and ongoing Java issues," he says. "Microsoft has a very close relationship with Oracle, so it wouldn't surprise me if these bulletins include Java patches."

Regardless, they put unpatched machines in danger of falling to remote code execution exploits, Microsoft says, and may require restarting affected machines, something that will make installing the patches a longer exercise.

There are 12 patches in all this month, an uptick from the past few months, and they affect a wide range of Windows platforms from Windows XP to Windows RT, the new Windows 8 tablet operating system that runs on ARM processors. "It's never a good sign when your current code base is impacted," Henry says. This month's 12 patches is the highest number since June 2011 when there were 16.

One remaining patch ranked important affects the FAST indexing server for SharePoint and is caused by an update to some Oracle libraries used for document conversion by Microsoft, says

The remaining bulletins are all rated important and are mostly "Local Elevation of Privilege" type of vulnerabilities, meaning that one already has to be on the targeted computer to be able to attack them. One exception is Bulletin 5, which can be used for Remote Code Execution. It affects the FAST Indexing server for SharePoint and it is also caused by Oracle's update of the Outside In libraries that are used by Microsoft for document conversion processes, says Wolfgang Kandek, CTO for Qualys.

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Microsoft brings the Live Tile experience to SkyDrive

Windows 8's new Start screen evokes many emotions from customers, with most falling on either the love or hate side with almost no middle ground. However, one thing that can be agreed on is that the screen has no shortage of information. Users are bombarded with messages from Facebook, email, weather and countless other endlessly updating tiles. Now Microsoft has added one more to the perhaps overloaded mix.

Today the company announced it is pushing an update to the SkyDrive app for Windows 8 that will bring the live tile features to the cloud storage and sharing platform.

In an announcement earlier today Microsoft's Mike Torres outlined the new feature. "The SkyDrive app from the Windows Store will start showing you notifications on the live tile when you add new files to your SkyDrive". In other words, this should not be a constantly flickering icon that will be in your face. Torres went on to explain that "whenever you add new files to SkyDrive, the app tile shows you relevant details. If you add a document, you’ll see the document name, along with when it was added, and what folder it’s in. If you add photos, the tile gives you a nice view of those photos".

I honestly like live tiles. When I walk away from my computer I switch to the Start screen so that when I return, or even pass by, I see relevant information. Its easier than clicking on different tabs. I also realize that I very well may be part of a minority in saying that.

As for the update, it is promised to be rolling out today -- apparently on a gradual basis, so don't panic if you don't have it yet. I don't either. Hopefully soon.

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