Category Archives: Cloud Storage

AWS follows Google Cloud, drops egress fees when moving all data to another cloud provider – TechRadar

In a significant move not just for Amazon but for the cloud industry as a whole, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has declared that it will no longer charge customers to migrate their data away from the platform in the event that they choose another provider.

Amazon says its decision aims to give customers greater flexibility to choose their preferred cloud, on-prem, or hybrid solutions. It comes in the wake of Google Cloud making a similar move around two months ago.

The decision aligns with the European Data Act, which came into force in January 2024 and aims to enhance competition by facilitating easier cloud provider transitions.

Previously, AWS users were limited by the companys 100GB-per-month free data transfer limit, however while that still stands, those wishing to move all of their data to another provider can now do so for free.

Despite the European Data Act focusing on promoting competition specifically within Europe, AWSs policy change applies globally, as does Googles. Its unclear whether the providers agree that derestricting egress is the right thing to do or whether they anticipate similar regulations coming into force globally.

AWSs change isnt quite as simple as making a move free because customers must first contact the company in order to receive credits to cover the cost of the egress. We posited that this could be a ploy to convince customers to stay with AWS rather than switch providers, but a company spokesperson affirmed that it understands why some customers may wish to move, adding that by contacting AWS, advisors can help the process.

In a blog post introducing the change, AWS developer Sbastien Stormacq expressed hope that users will choose to stay within the AWS ecosystem despite the new ability to swap providers more freely.

Ultimately, the removal of fees is a step in the right direction, however the company, which is under the watchful eye of the UKs Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), still imposes some technical barriers that hamper interoperability.

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AWS follows Google Cloud, drops egress fees when moving all data to another cloud provider - TechRadar

Get More with Google One: Fitbit and Nest Services at No Extra Cost – Gizchina.com

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Get More with Google One: Fitbit and Nest Services at No Extra Cost - Gizchina.com

AWS follows Google Cloud, drops egress fees when moving data out of its system – Yahoo! Voices

In a significant move not just for Amazon but for the cloud industry as a whole, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has declared that it will no longer charge customers to migrate their data away from the platform.

Amazon says its a decision thats aimed to provide customers with greater flexibility to choose their preferred cloud, on-prem, or hybrid solutions, and it comes in the wake of Google Cloud pulling a similar move around two months ago.

The decision aligns with the European Data Act, which came into force in January 2024 with the intention of enhancing competition by facilitating easier cloud provider transitions.

Previously, AWS users were limited by the companys 100GB-per-month free data transfer limit, which has now been lifted in favor of totally unrestricted migration upon egress.

Despite the European Data Act focusing on promoting competition specifically within Europe, AWSs policy change applies globally, as does Googles. Its unclear whether the providers agree that derestricting egress is the right thing to do or whether they anticipate similar regulations coming into force globally.

AWSs change isnt quite as simple as making a move free because customers must first contact the company in order to receive credits to cover the cost of the egress. This could even be a ploy to talk customers into staying with AWS rather than switching providers.

In a blog post introducing the change, AWS developer Sbastien Stormacq expressed hope that users will choose to stay within the AWS ecosystem despite the new ability to swap providers more freely.

Ultimately, the removal of fees is a step in the right direction, however the company, which is under the watchful eye of the UKs Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), still imposes some technical barriers that hamper interoperability.

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AWS follows Google Cloud, drops egress fees when moving data out of its system - Yahoo! Voices

New study finds AEC firms using 50% more cloud storage than before – Planning, Building & Construction Today

The 2024 AEC Data Insights Report from Egnyte shows that the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry is embracing the shift to cloud storage and other digital construction tools.

The data storage requirements of the companies surveyed grew at an average compounded annual growth rate of 50.3%.

Egynte observes that this rapid growth trend began during the pandemic, but as companies started to see the benefits of the cloud, growth has maintained that pace.

Cloud storage and collaboration solutions have become an increasingly normalised part of the AEC industry workings- and can help meet new regulatory requirements, such as those of the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Compliance (CMMC) in the United States and the Building Safety Act in the UK.

The findings are based on data from more than 4,000 companies in Egnytes customer base, which includes firms representing every stage of the AEC project lifecycle.

The insights we gleaned from this years report reflect the conversations we have with AEC firms on a daily basis. Companies are relying more heavily on digital collaboration to get the job done a trend that shows no signs of slowing down, said Ronen Vengosh, senior vice president of Industry Solutions at Egnyte.

Their increased reliance on cloud collaboration and file storage coupled with the high frequency of cybersecurity threats these firms encounter highlights the need for secure, reliable cloud collaboration solutions.

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New study finds AEC firms using 50% more cloud storage than before - Planning, Building & Construction Today

Storage and backup spend in 2024 targets risk and resilience – ComputerWeekly.com

Storage and backup investment plans for 2024 show a significant bias towards averting risk and building resilience. At the same time, storage spending plans lean towards the cloud, but with very robust on-premise storage spending plans also present.

Those are the findings of the Technology spending intentions survey from TechTarget and ESG, which questioned 1,432 technology decision-makers worldwide over three key areas:

When asked about storage and data protection technologies that organisations plan to invest in over the next 12 months, the overwhelming majority of responses indicate plans of arguably a defensive nature. Therefore, at number one, we find data governance, risk and compliance, with disaster recovery, cyber resilience and business continuity next. Joint-fourth is ransomware protection. Only in sixth place do we see something thats not explicitly about protection of data or risk, namely public cloud file storage as a key investment.

Next up, we were back on defence, with data management of cloud and unstructured data, backup for cloud data, and backup hardware and software.

Public cloud object storage comes last in the list of 10 investment priorities.

When these responses were broken down between enterprise and mid-market decision-makers, storage-as-a-service also creeps into the top 10 priorities.

Public cloud storage (file and object) continues to be the most likely storage investment. But on-premise investments are still significant, especially in the context of organisations reevaluating whether the cloud is the right place to store data and applications.

As mentioned above, when it comes to investment in storage capacity, cloud storage is a prominent priority, with file (31% of those questioned) and object (24%) the most significant storage investments planned worldwide.

Storage as a service came in third in the list of investment priorities, with planned spend in 2024 by 23% of respondents.

Cloud block storage was also cited by 16% of those asked, but the other seven in a list of 11 storage technology areas are unambiguously on-premise.

Internal server storage tops the list of investment priorities here (19%), followed by hyper-converged infrastructure (16%), software-defined storage (15%) and on-premise SAN capacity Ethernet (15%) and Fibre Channel (12%). Behind those are flash storage (12%) and on-premise direct attached storage (10%).

The survey also broke down responses between North America, EMEA and Asia-Pacific. Where these vary significantly includes public cloud file and object storage in North America, which lags behind the worldwide average (26% and 19%), while it leads in cloud block storage plans by a long way (29% versus 16%).

Meanwhile, flash storage plans are significantly more prevalent in North America (16%) and APAC (14%) than in EMEA (9%).

In data protection generally, theres a big bias towards building resilience and averting risk. Meanwhile, the nuts and bolts of that resilience, in the shape of backup including of cloud data such as containers takes up a significant portion of planned spend in 2024.

Priorities around data protection are topped by disaster recovery (37%), with the closely allied business continuity in third place (32%).

All of the top five priorities centre on resilience and include data governance, risk and compliance in joint top (37%), and cyber resilience services (33%).

Backup figures heavily as a spending priority, with backup for cloud data such as VMs and containers the most prominent (25%), backup hardware and software generally (24%), and backup-as-a-service (18%), endpoint backup (17%), and SaaS application data backup also on 17%.

In the middle of all of the above is data management for example, for cloud and unstructured data of which 27% said it would be an investment priority in 2024.

Archiving is among investment plans for 17% of those questioned.

Meanwhile, tapes not dead, but its not a huge priority for many (3%), and is down on last years 6%.

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Storage and backup spend in 2024 targets risk and resilience - ComputerWeekly.com

Reducing Cloud Waste a Top Priority in 2024, FinOps Foundation Says – Datanami

(ESB-Professional/Shutterstock)

The increasing cost of cloud computing, particularly when it comes to storing data to feed AI algorithms, is a growing concern among companies, particularly larger ones, according to a new report by the FinOps Foundation.

The FinOps Foundations fourth annual State of FinOps Survey, released last week, detected some significant changes in cloud spending patterns compared to previous years. The survey found that spending on compute capacity is no longer the big issue that it once was, and that compute is now the most optimized among the different categories of cloud spending.

Now, spending on cloud storage, databases, and containers are the main points of concern, according to the survey by FinOps Foundation, which touched more than 1,200 IT practitioners across more than 1,000 companies, with an average cloud bill of $44 million per year and total combined spending of $55 billion annually.

Reducing waste is the key FinOps priority for 2024 (Courtesy: FinOps Foundation under the CC BY 4.0)

The biggest FinOps spending is targeting compute instances, the survey shows, with more than 50% having already spent heavily to optimize compute. That leaves plenty of room for optimizing other aspects of cloud computing, the FinOps Foundation says, including data and storage, database, containers, backup and retention, data transfer and networking, and more.

One area where lots of improvement can be made is in regards to forecasting of cloud spending. While the biggest companies have already made substantial investments in forecasting cloud spending, there are many ways they can enhance their forecasts through automation, optimization, and adapting to user behavior.

AI represents both a threat to FinOps, as well as a potential savior. On the one hand, AI can consume enormous demand for storage and compute in the cloud. But on the other, AI can potentially help companies to optimize their cloud spending. Currently, AI is mostly hurting, the FinOps Foundation says.

Reining in AI and machine learning spending was a bigger concern for larger companies, or those spending $100 million or more per year in the cloud, the FinOps Foundation says. Just 31% of all survey respondents said AI and ML spending was impacting their FinOps practice, whereas that percentage jumps to 45% for companies spending $100 million or more annually in the cloud.

AI, rather than initially helping, is actually starting to negatively impact cloud bills for large spenders and is directly impacting margins due to increased spending in the cloud, J.R. Storment, the FinOps Foundations executive director, stated in a press release.

What FinOps practitioners are optimizing (Image courtesy FinOps Foundation under the CC BY 4.0)

One trend to look out for in the coming years is the intersection between the FinOps and sustainability teams, the FinOps Foundation says. Today, only 20% of FinOps teams are working with sustainability teams, but 50% foresee that taking place in the future, according to the survey.

The survey shows that the field of FinOps is alive and well, writes Mike Fuller, CTO of the FinOps Foundation, which is associated with the Linux Foundation.

This years data illustrate that FinOps is not a one-and-done cost-cutting activity, Fuller writes in a blog. FinOps is about aligning spending to business goals, and since business goals must shift from time to time (as they did this year), FinOps is never done. Businesses continue to need FinOps practitioners to help shift behavior as cloud adoption hits material levels, and to maintain it when business priorities change.

You can access the State of FinOps 2024 report here.

Related Items:

Overcoming the Financial Breaking Point: How Businesses Can Overcome Data Cost Anxiety

How to Manage Cloud Costs in a Dynamic Economy With FinOps

Waste Not, Want Not

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Reducing Cloud Waste a Top Priority in 2024, FinOps Foundation Says - Datanami

Ditching Google Drive for Microsoft OneDrive was one of the best choices I’ve ever made – TechRadar

Like most parents, the amount of digital photos I took exploded when my daughter was born. By the time her umbilical cord was cut Id already had emails from Google not to congratulate me (thanks Google), but to let me know my Google Drive was filling up fast.

As my daughter turned from a grey and slimy newborn into an adorable baby, and started actually doing interesting and cute things, rather than just being a screaming potato, my Google Drive capacity came under even greater strain thanks to the deluge of photos I was taking. Googles emails became more alarming as I reached my storage quota.

As a filthy Android user, Google Photos and Google Drive were my default services for cloud storage, and I hadnt felt the need to look elsewhere. As an owner of an original Google Pixel smartphone, it actually made sense to stick with Google Photos, as the company was once offering unlimited storage for your snaps. Sadly, not only had Google since stopped offering that incentive to get people to buy its smartphones, but by the time my daughter was born, Id switched to a Samsung smartphone.

Having the photos I take on my smartphone get automatically backed up in full quality was extremely important for me these were photos I would be devastated to lose if my phone got lost or broken. So, with the threat that my photos would no longer get backed up, I needed to act fast.

The most obvious step was to increase my Google Drive storage amount. However, I was already paying $2.99 per month for 200GB. The only larger option was for 2TB for $9.99 a huge increase in the monthly price and even with my trigger-happy snapping, I didnt think I would need that much. As a new parent, I needed to watch my outgoings. So, I decided to shop about and it didnt end well for Google.

When looking for a replacement cloud storage solution for my rapidly growing photo collection, there was one service I had already made up my mind about not using OneDrive.

This was Microsofts cloud storage solution, and in classic Microsoft style, it had been pushing it hard in Windows 11. To an almost obnoxious extent. Every time I tested out a new laptop or PC which due to my job, is very often I was being begged to turn on OneDrive to sync all my devices.

I wasnt a fan, and most of the time, I had been happy with Google Drive, so I didnt want another cloud storage service and I resented constantly being asked about it.

But as I was no longer content with Google Drive, I thought Id look into what Microsoft was offering. While, like Google, Microsoft offers a free tier for OneDrive, its just 5GB, which isnt enough for my photos.

However, the Microsoft 365 Personal tier offers 1TB of storage a lot more than the 200GB I was using, but without being more than I would need for $6.99 a month (and its cheaper if you pay yearly). Along with 1TB of storage, it also includes licenses for Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. This was another big selling point for me, as even in the age of Google Docs, Im one of those weirdos who still prefers to use office apps, especially word processors, that have been installed locally.

For longer-form articles, they give me a sense of security and control I just dont feel with Google Docs, so I was thinking of investing in Microsoft Office anyway (or using the free alternative LibreOffice). Having physical files on my PC also meant I could back them up to a NAS device, while also using cloud storage (paranoid? Perhaps).

One thing I do like about Google Docs is that its constantly saving in the background, so if your PC crashes, youre unlikely to lose much work, and you can log in and access the documents from other machines as well.

Even if your PC completely breaks, your documents will be accessible via the internet from another machine. So, I was quite happy to see that Word (and the other Office applications) offer similar functionality. If you save a document to your OneDrive folder on your PC, you can select it to auto save constantly (rather than saving every five minutes or so), and then access those files via the web. It also has version history as well, and you can edit documents within a web browser, so you dont even need Word or Excel installed.

That made my mind up and I subscribed. So far Ive been very happy with OneDrive, and feel a bit bad about ignoring it for so long. Theres an Android app available that automatically uploads the photos I take on my phone, and also helps me save space on my handset by safely deleting uploaded images once they are backed up. Its not as seamless as using the Photos app and Google Drive on an Android phone, but its also not the nightmare I had feared.

So far, the 1TB of storage space has been more than enough for all my photos. I haven't felt the need (nor been bugged) to upgrade my storage. In fact, I now use OneDrive for storing music projects Ive created in Ableton Live. These can be quite large files, but I still have plenty of space, and it means I can open up those projects on my desktop PC as well as my MacBook. Yep, theres a OneDrive app for Macs, and it integrates quite nicely into macOS.

Of course, Windows 11 integration is where it shines even if I still get annoyed by Windows 11 trying to make everything default to my OneDrive storage, and having to scroll past all my OneDrive folders in File Explorer just to get to my local storage (you know, sometimes Microsoft I may want to go into my Downloads folder).

Its also helped when reviewing new Windows 11 devices. Instead of getting angry about the suggestion of signing up for OneDrive, now when I set up a new Windows 11 laptop or PC, I use my Microsoft Account and enable OneDrive and all of my files and folders appear without me having to install any third party applications.

So I am happy to admit that I was wrong about OneDrive its a genuinely useful and good value service. Perhaps if Microsoft hadnt been so pushy about me trying it, Id have given it a go sooner.

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Ditching Google Drive for Microsoft OneDrive was one of the best choices I've ever made - TechRadar

It’s time to upgrade OneDrive’s paid storage, Microsoft – PCWorld

Its been literally a decade since Microsoft raised the cap on its paid Microsoft 365 storage plans to 1 terabyte of OneDrive cloud storage. Its time for an upgrade, dont you think?

Last week, Google changed its name of its Bard AI assistant to Gemini, launched Gemini Advanced, and in the most important change of all made 2TB of cloud storage the foundation for its new premium pricing tier. Okay, that last point is a lie. Because Google offered a free upgrade to its Google One plan six years ago, granting 2TB of cloud storage for $9.99 per month the same price as Microsoft charges for 1TB of storage.

Okay, even thats not totally accurate, since the same 2TB Google One deal is available to new users for $2.49 per month for three months, before returning to $9.99 per month.

The reason Microsoft loves subscriptions is that theyre sticky: You sign up, set it to autopay on your credit card, and forget about it. But as consumers start re-evaluating their streaming plans (do I really want to pay for Netflix if they cancel everything after two seasons?), its worth asking the same hard questions about Microsoft 365.

Microsoft 365 both the $69.99 annual plan for Microsoft 365 Personal and the $99.99 annual plan for Microsoft 365 Family give you Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the main reason that most people sign up. But from there, it gets iffy. Outlook? Id much rather have Mail, thanks. Microsoft Defender? That comes with Windows, or there are other free antivirus solutions available. Clipchamp? I love it, true, but Microsoft tried to make that a $19 monthly subscription, too.

Mark Hachman / IDG

A consumer version of Teams, Access, Publisher, Forms, and Skype? Im going to argue that the value there is next to nil for many people, especially in a world with Zoom, Canva, Microsoft Designer, and other solutions. Yes, there are hidden reasons to subscribe to Microsoft 365, but they dont seem as potent as they once were.

Storage, though, matters, and its a travesty that Microsoft hasnt kept up with the times. In 2014, phones like the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 offered 16Mpixel cameras, even back then. Today, a camera like the Samsung Galaxy S23 or S24 allows you to shoot 200Mpixel still shots, plus 4K videos and even more. As long as you set your phone to automatically upload your photos and movies to OneDrive, the available storage space can be sucked up quickly. And, of course, a Microsoft 365 subscription includes all of the other files that you use daily, from Word to PowerPoint. In all, what you might call storage inflation is increasing, and it will only continue.

Mark Hachman / IDG

One of the reasons that Googles own storage policy change received such attention was that it felt unfair. Google used to offer unlimited photo storage, even compressed which, to be fair, it didnt have to do. But doing away with all that was just the first step in making all of the photos you uploaded count against your free 15GB storage cap, prompting you to pay for a Google One subscription, or at least additional storage. It was anxiety-inducing, especially during a pandemic when people didnt need extra anxiety.

Now both Microsoft and Google are asking consumers and businesses to pay an additional fee to access the top tier of their respective AI LLMs: $20 per month for a new Google One AI Premium subscription (Google Workspace, 2TB of storage, and Gemini Pro, among other benefits) versus $26.99 ($6.99 per user per month for Microsoft 365 Personal with 1TB of storage, plus an additional $20/mo for Copilot Pro). Google simply offers a substantially better deal.

Microsoft has historically jerked consumers around when it comes to cloud storage, enough that I had to consult OneDrives Wikipedia page to get it all straight. Remember, in 2014, Microsoft upgraded Office 365 subscribers to 1TB of OneDrive storage, giddily pushed it to unlimited OneDrive storage, then reneged on the deal and settled on the 1TB limit a year later. Its remained 1TB ever since. Even the Microsoft 365 Family plan (which offers up to 6TB of storage) doesnt pool the storage; its 1TB per user, with up to six users.

Its also worth pointing out, incidentally, that Dropboxs low-end Plus plan is, yep, $9.99 per month for 2TB.

If Microsoft executives want to make consumers pay through the nose to satisfy their shareholders, there are plenty of AI-related services to justify the cost. Enterprises can afford those premium services, too. But jerking around consumers with Microsoft Rewards points and failing to upgrade the OneDrive tier with additional storage feels a little slimy. Its time to get with the times, Microsoft, and offer more for our money.

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It's time to upgrade OneDrive's paid storage, Microsoft - PCWorld

Sony’s Creator Cloud now allows photos & videos to be directly uploaded to cloud storage from the FX3 & FX30 – Newsshooter

Sonys Creator Cloud now allows photos and videos taken with cameras such as the FX3 and FX30to be directly uploaded to cloud storage.

After setting it up in Creators App or on Creators Cloud Web, you can connect your camera to the cloud storage and upload photos and videos directly without needing to do it via your smartphone. You can quickly check your captured images/videos from various devices, and get started on editing.

Huge image data such as high image quality photos and videos are able to be transferred to a smartphone both via Wi-Fi and USB cable. A wired connection provides more stable transfer.

From March 2024 onwards, the 1, 9 III, 7S III, and 7 IV will also be compatible with this function. Please note that to be able to use this feature you will need to perform a software update for the camera you are using.

Sony has four different plans you can choose from. If you own an eligible Sony camera, you can start with a free 25 GB plan. A 500 GB plan is also available for heavy users.

By linking your smartphone to cameras, you can control them remotely from the smartphone. This enables remote shooting, which may be useful for group shots or keeping cameras still in night scenes. You can also check camera battery and media information, set the date, time, or camera name, and more from a smartphone.

LUT files stored in the cloud storage (Creators Cloud) can also be imported to the camera via smartphone without using any PC and SD card.

Matthew Allard is a multi-award-winning, ACS accredited freelance Director of Photography with over 30 years' of experience working in more than 50 countries around the world.

He is the Editor of Newsshooter.com and has been writing on the site since 2010.

Matthew has won 49 ACS Awards, including five prestigious Golden Tripods. In 2016 he won the Award for Best Cinematography at the 21st Asian Television Awards.

Matthew is available to hire as a DP in Japan or for work anywhere else in the world.

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Sony's Creator Cloud now allows photos & videos to be directly uploaded to cloud storage from the FX3 & FX30 - Newsshooter

Cloud DVR levels up with video expertise and operational agility from Ateme and AWS | Amazon Web Services – AWS Blog

This blog is co-authored by Francois Guilleautot, Director of cloud solutions, Ateme.

Since its introduction at the 1999 CES show in Las Vegas, Digital Video Recording (DVR) has existed in various forms. While the technology is not new (Ateme has offered DVR solutions since 2016), the transition to over-the-top (OTT) streaming has accelerated adoption, with the DVR market expected to grow from $6.4B USD in 2023 to $16.4B USD by 2030. Consumers now record more content than ever, and expect recordings to be available on any device, from anywhere. In fact, recording capability is now the most desired functionality for a streaming service.

Although demand for recording capabilities has increased with streaming, the concept itself is not new. Technology to record television for later viewing has been available for more than 50 years. In the age of analog TV, VHS and Betamax tape recorders were available to save copies of your favorite programs. Prior to that, television viewers may remember G-Code, VideoPlus+, or ShowView codes in the TV Guide to ease the pain of setting a recording time.

In the era of digital television, hard drives were integrated into set-top-boxes (STBs) to allow for recording capabilities. A large number of legacy STBs are still in use today. However, TV operators ultimately realized that STB DVR capabilities were inefficient and expensive. Video requires substantial storage capacity and high performance. Providing millions of users with hundreds of hours of storage means managing fleets of STBs with pricey, failure-prone, and rapidly aging hard drives.

To reduce management and services costs, Network Digital Video Recording (nDVR) platforms, such as Atemes NEA DVR, emerged. The concept is simple: rather than dispersed recordings over countless hard drives, providers merge their storage on a single unified platform. This improves efficiency and reduces overhead, leading to improved total cost of ownership for the operator. With nDVR, drives are part of an owned infrastructure with better protection and improved durability, while allowing customer access via the operators closed network or via the internet.

As operators improved operations, the viewers experience improved with recordings available from any device connected to the nDVR. Consumer began to record more content, in increasingly higher resolution, including 4K. One of Atemes customers scaled up to 300 racks of video storage for its nDVR system, accommodating content over 15 years of age.

Expanding video recording systems comes with a distinct set of difficulties. The first challenge is managing massive scalability. Modern streaming services generate anywhere from a few hundred gigabytes to tens of terabytes of recordings each day, depending on the legal status of the country hosting the platform. With Shared-copy permitted by most nations, if multiple users record the same content (e.g., a football match or a movie), a single copy is stored and accessed by all who record it. This shrinks the amount of raw storage space required by a factor of 10 or even 100. Even with shared copy techniques, network DVR platforms can expand to enormous scale, reaching hundreds of petabytes. Managing storage volumes of this magnitude requires substantial compute, network, and storage resourcesup to tens of thousands of HDDs or SSDs.

DVR places an incredible amount of pressure on storage. To ensure an optimal viewing experience (start time, resolution, re-buffering), high Inputs/Outputs Operations per Second (IOPS) are required to support throughput traffic on the storage. Commodity, high-capacity hard drives do not have the IOPS required to deliver content to thousands or tens of thousands concurrent viewers requesting high-resolution content simultaneously. Using more drives in parallel improves storage performance, but requires additional CPU capacity to fully use extra storage, which increases cost.

Beyond the sheer size and performance requirements for storage, availability (and therefore redundancy) is an important consideration. Subscribers expect their content to be available instantly, even months or years after the recording. To allow such a high level of availability, nDVR vendors use high-performance Network-Attached Storage (NAS) with large redundant arrays of independent disks (RAID), or a distributed storage system with a dedicated erasure coding mechanism for better performance and density. However, these systems have limited scalability. The additional storage requires matching compute power and networking to ensure smooth operation, compounding already difficult storage capacity requirements.

Such a large, high-performance video storage platform comes with high maintenance costs. Large recording platforms require hundreds to thousands of MWh per year in power and cooling, as well as engineers dedicated to the hardware management who may encounter frequent disk failures and other hardware issues across hundreds of servers. Engineers must regularly roll out operating system and software updates to fix bugs and avoid ransomware attacks. A recent example is the 2021 LOG4J Zero-Day vulnerability.

Migrating DVR platforms to the cloud provides an elegant solution to the problems previously listed, namely scalability, operational complexity, cost, and security. For example, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) offers virtually unlimited storage capacity with high-speed, built-in data transfers, and data redundancy by writing across multiple Availability Zones within a region. This provides 99.99% availability and 11-9s of durability for recordings. Adding a geo-redundancy dimension, not economically viable with on-premises platforms, improves recording availability. On top of offering better reliability, Amazon Web Services (AWS) also handles the undifferentiated heavy lifting of hardware and OS security. AWS offers additional security features such as encryption at rest and in transit, and integration with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for fine-grained access control of video content.

The major benefit of migrating to Amazon S3 cloud storage is native storage tiering. Storage tiering is a feature that Ateme offers with its legacy nDVR system and that AWS offers natively. This allows you to choose from different storage classes based on data access patterns, with less frequently accessed video files located to lower-cost storage tiers, optimizing costs without compromising accessibility. This is especially relevant for video recordings as usage patterns change over time, with older recordings requested less often than recent recordings.

Ateme uses four Amazon storage services to optimize cost over the course of an asset lifecycle. In an end-to-end cloud-native OTT platform, an asset starts its lifecycle on premises or on Amazon gp2 Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) as part of a live channel rolling buffer for time-shifted TV (TSTV) for maximum performance (IOPS). The asset then moves to an S3 Standard bucket to enable Catch-up or backwards EPG services. As the asset ages out of the backward EPG, its popularity and number of requests decreases. With a decreasing number of requests, it will be moved to S3 Infrequent Access and then to Glacier Instant Retrieval (GIR). GIR is the lowest tier of storage available to reduce prices while still allowing for instant playback. S3 Intelligent tiering allows assets to be programmatically moved between storage classes based on access patterns.

To best leverage the benefits of cloud storage, Ateme rearchitected its entire recording pipeline. In 2023, it launched a new cloud-native recording platform, NEA Genesis. Ateme designed NEA Genesis using a micro-services architecture to operate natively on AWS. This move away from a monolithic architecture allows Ateme to scale out logical blocks independently such as ingest, storage, and playout.

Ateme NEA Genesis High Level Architecture

Scaling logical blocks independently allows streaming platforms to optimize their non-linear video operations with a flexible and unified solution for VOD and recordings. With NEA Genesis, not only is it possible to grow storage independently of compute, but it is now possible to scale up ingest and playout dynamically. This provides flexibility to add large batches of VOD and event-based channels, or scale up playout capacity when demand surges. On-premises infrastructure scales these resources together, and typically only allows scaling up, which leads to over-provisioning. AWS infrastructure supports Atemes ability to scale ingest, storage, and egress independently, a major advantage over the limitation of on-premises hardware.

NEA Genesis includes additional modules for advanced functionality. For example, it supports encrypted or clear asset storage, with a dedicated packager/re-packager and encryption service to ensure platform compatibility with future standards. This means that assets can be ingested in a single format (e.g., DASH or CMAF) and redistributed in whatever combination of streaming protocol and DRM that is relevant in the future. NEA Genesis customers also benefit from both the advanced features of Atemes in-house built packaging engine and Atemes extensive integration library with CMS and DRM partners for frictionless onboarding.

To learn more about the benefits of cloud DVR solutions from Ateme, visit the companys website.

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Cloud DVR levels up with video expertise and operational agility from Ateme and AWS | Amazon Web Services - AWS Blog