Berkeley’s FAQ states:

As part of our budget reduction strategy and in line with an emerging trend in higher education, UC Berkeley is migrating to Google Apps for Education to provide much needed and often requested services to the campus. Google meets these needs, and also provides our faculty, students, and staff with many additional benefits.

Savings will be achieved through the elimination of non-productive, redundant services, and some decrease in infrastructure expenditures.

As part of their evaluation, Berkeley have produced a thorough matrix explaining how Google Apps compared to Microsoft Office 365 in the areas that mattered to their particular deployment. While Office 365 won out in some areas, Google Apps was the winner on the day.

Stoneburn recently helped a UK university migrate over 15,000 students to Google Apps for Education. Contact us and see how we can help you!

Red Gate Software, who run the hugely successful sqlservercentral.com for Microsoft SQL Server users, have recently launched ACloudyPlace.com for cloud developers.

Craig’s first post explores the history of Amazon’s NoSQL storage, looks at the new DynamoDB service, and talks about why it may or may not be the right technology for you.

Check it out now.

2011 was an amazing year for Stoneburn, and 2012 is set to be even better. Due to our continuing growth, Stoneburn, UK’s leading Google Enterprise partner, are recruiting for Google Apps deployment consultants and a sales executive in the Enterprise Search and Cloud Computing disciplines. Interviews are being arranged immediately. Check out the job descriptions and get in touch now!

The message of cost savings and increased agility with Google Apps, Google Search and Amazon Web Services resonates in all areas of IT, and was especially popular with the 2e2 team.

Congratulations to Alex Muir, the winner of the Google Chromebook prize!

Since 2003, the standard for in-memory caching has been memcached, developed by Brad Fiztpatrick for LiveJournal. While there have been many other cache programs written since then, many use the memcached protocol, including many with persistence (such as memcachedb and Redis).

In August, Amazon launched ElastiCache: this allows you to build clusters of nodes running a distributed, in-memory cache.

By design, the memcached protocol is designed to be simple and fast. It doesn’t have any authentication. In a well-written app, even if your caches go down, your application should still function, albeit slower. With an automation tool such as Chef or Puppet it’s pretty easy to spin up a memcache cluster.

So why use ElastiCache instead?

Well, firstly, not everyone has a Chef or Puppet infrastructure.  (Though we thoroughly recommend that you should.  Contact us and we’ll talk!)  The new update from Amazon today introduces CloudFormation support, which makes installing a cache cluster as easy as this:

Next up, there are dozens of metrics from ElastiCache which you can access and graph in CloudWatch:

ElastiCache was launched in US East (N. Virginia) only in August, but as of today, it’s now available in four more regions: US West (N. California), EU West (Dublin), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo).

While users love the fact they can access corporate e-mail on mobile devices — even those they provide themselves — corporate IT departments like to know what is connecting to their services, and to ensure that adequate security policies are available on any devices that can connect to corporate information.

In today’s world, staff commonly have a mobile device that is newer and more powerful than what a business provides — especially if the business has a standard device which it only updates every few years. This is the same “consumerization of IT” that tells us if you do not offer as good an e-mail solution as what you can get for free on the Internet, people will simply route around your internal communication system. Another compelling reason to adopt Google Apps!

Google’s mobile management functions allow you to control which of your user groups can use the mobile sync features to download e-mail onto a device, as well as security features for that device, including password strength and device encryption (for supported devices).

You can also get information about trends in your mobile fleet, including software version number:

And of course, you can find your Android devices on a map:

Meanwhile, BlackBerry manufacturers RIM are hoping to stem the flow of enterprise users and remain relevant by releasing a management platform for iOS and Android devices. BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, currently in beta, is due in March 2012. Google’s tool is ready today, supports Windows Mobile, iPhone, iPad and Android, and is free for all Google Apps for Business users.

Due to amazing growth, Stoneburn, a leading Google Apps partner in the UK, are looking for two outstanding individuals to join as Postini and Google Apps support administrators.  Interviews are being arranged immediately. Check out the job description and get in touch ASAP!

October’s improvements include:

• IPv6 support in Asia Pacific
• up to 8 DNS entries on the load balancer (allowing round-robin without another DNS request – this was previously a request-only feature)
• CloudWatch metrics for HTTP success and error codes from both the load balancer, and the instances behind it. These are exposed as graphs in the admin console:

Today, Amazon have announced that ELB is now available within VPC, allowing you to balance your instances behind your Internet gateway:

To me, the most exciting part of this post is the sentence hidden at the end: we can soon expect “the ability to use Elastic Load Balancers for internal application tiers”.  Currently, an elastic load balancer can only accept requests from the public Internet. You can put one in the middle of your architecture — to balance your middleware tier, for example — but this would mean anyone who found the IP address could connect to the instances with none of the security protection afforded by the front-end. This change will free up people from having to run pairs of proxy servers to provide HA inside the app.

If you want to know more in-depth technical details about Elastic Load Balancing, our Head of Cloud Services wrote an in-depth technical introduction to Elastic Load Balancing, on his personal blog last year, which is well worth reading.

Address Is Approximate from The Theory on Vimeo.

What does it look like?

We believe it looks like this!

This is Amazon’s Perdix: a self-contained, pre-fabricated data centre module in a standard shipping crate, which can be dropped into a geologically safe location with good power and connectivity. This rare peek behind the curtain was presented by AWS VP and Distinguished Engineer, James Hamilton, at an “open house” in June 2011. As well as discussion of the trend towards modular data centres (also used by Microsoft and Google), Hamilton identified that servers are just 57% of the cost of running a data center, with power distribution & cooling coming second at 18% and power at 13%.

The new facilities will contain many of these modules.

Where is it?

Talk of Oregon locations for a modular data centre were reported on in March by DatacenterDynamics.

According to a post on Hacker News, one Availability Zone is in the Port of Umatilla, the other at the Port of Morrow, near Boardman. Interesting to note is that it is about a 36 minute drive between the two sites: in keeping with Amazon’s promise that AZs are far enough apart that an event in one is unlikely to affect the other, but close enough that an engineer can get between them quickly.

Why is it cheaper?

Amazon VP Adam Selipsky, speaking to Wired, said ”Given costs around [the Bay Area], the Northern California Region is more expensive than what we offer on the east coast. One of the reasons we opened the Oregon region is provide lower costs for those who want to use a region in the West.”

How much capacity does it have?

There’s currently a single /16 block of IP addresses allocated to the us-west-2 region: with this, according to Adrian Cockroft at Netflix, Amazon Web Services now has over 1 million public IP addresses!