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Tag: storage

  • Box Exploring Potential Sale Amid Shareholder Pressure

    Box Exploring Potential Sale Amid Shareholder Pressure

    Box, the popular file-sharing cloud service, is exploring a possible sale in response to pressure from an activist shareholder.

    Box is one of the premier file-sharing cloud services, and one of the main competitors to Dropbox. Unfortunately, Box has not capitalized on the remote work transformation currently underway to the same extent as its rivals. This has led hedge fund Starboard Value LP to threaten a challenge to the board.

    Now Reuters is reporting that Box is considering a sale to another company or private equity form. One of the issues Box has faced is the crowded field it competes in, with many of its services matched by larger rivals with more comprehensive offerings. For example, Microsoft 365 comes with a OneDrive account, featuring 1 TB of storage.

    Box did not comment on Reuter’s story, and it remains to be seen if a deal will happen. The sources indicated a sale is not certain.

  • New Launch Evolves the Dropbox Experience To a Living Team Workspace, Says CEO

    New Launch Evolves the Dropbox Experience To a Living Team Workspace, Says CEO

    “We’ve launched the biggest change we’ve ever made to our product, an all-new desktop app,: says Dropbox CEO Drew Houston. “It evolves the Dropbox experience from a folder full of files to a living team workspace. You can have not just files but any kind of cloud content. We saw so many of our customers, and frankly ourselves, struggling. There are all these new apps and they’re great but how do you stitch them all together? We see a big opportunity to make that a much more seamless experience.”

    Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox, discusses extensive new feature added to the Dropbox product from just a folder full of files to a living team workspace in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:

    Evolves the Dropbox Experience To a Living Team Workspace

    We’ve launched the biggest change we’ve ever made to our product, an all-new desktop app. It evolves the Dropbox experience from a folder full of files to a living team workspace. You can have not just files but any kind of cloud content. So G Suite, things like Google Docs, Sheets,  and Slides, really anything that you’re using. It also includes integrations with tools like Slack and Zoom. From within Dropbox, you can send people messages, you can start meetings, you can send things out for signature, or see your calendar. It’s a much more integrated workspace.

    We saw so many of our customers, and frankly ourselves, struggling. There are all these new apps and they’re great but how do you stitch them all together? We see a big opportunity to make that a much more seamless experience. We’re really excited about it and can’t wait to get it out there.

    The New Dropbox Experience Integrates Your Workspace

    New Dropbox Organizes and Simplifies Your Working Life

    Most, if not all companies, are going to have integrations. The opportunity we saw is to organize it, to really bring it into a well-designed coherent experience, and different from some of the messaging tools. What Dropbox allows you to do is within a native app you can have all your content in one place work across all these different ecosystems. Instead of the interface of just being a list of messages, you can see here’s what you’re working on. Here are our projects and here are the most important pieces of content. We think from a design standpoint it’s a pretty different approach.

    What we’re seeing is that users want choice. They are using all kinds of different apps for communication, for content, for coordination. What’s missing is a way to stitch it all together. That’s the role that we think we can play. It’s very similar to the role we played in the beginning with helping you get to your stuff from all these different platforms and operating systems. Now we’re thinking about how do we organize and simplify your working life and help stitch together all these different things.

    Second, I’d say a lot of what we’re doing is complimentary. You’re not going to stop using Slack or stop using these other tools. In fact, we’re making it easier for you to get to them. We find that a lot of our customers love using these different tools but they need a more integrated experience. Not having that means you’re always switching back and forth and there’s a lot of friction.

    New Launch Evolves the Dropbox Experience To a Living Team Workspace, Says CEO Drew Houston
  • Dropbox CEO: The Opportunity is Massive

    Dropbox CEO: The Opportunity is Massive

    Dropbox CEO Drew Houston says that making their product better is their primary strategy to achieving continued strong growth and he doesn’t expect their growth to slow down in the near future. Houston says that the opportunity is massive and that they are not going to run out of people who need Dropbox anytime soon.

    Drew Houston, Co-Founder & CEO of Dropbox, talked about their earnings release and their growth strategy on CNBC:

    The Opportunity is Massive

    We had another strong quarter, strong revenue growth, strong free cash flow. The way we see driving conversion is about bringing people along a journey from using Dropbox as individuals, maybe they start using the free version, and then they bring it into work and start using the business product. We’ve been able to do that at bigger and bigger scale over the last few years.

    The opportunity is massive. When we think about it, every company, every team in the world has content and needs to collaborate around it. We’re not going to run out of people who need Dropbox anytime soon and we have hundreds and millions of people who have used Dropbox. We’re operating in massive scale. So really we think about how do we drive people along that journey as effectively as possible?

    We Drive Value Per Subscriber by Making the Product Better

    The way we drive value per subscriber is make the product better. There’s a number of improvements we’ve made in this quarter and in the last few quarters. When you think about new features in Dropbox like Smart Sync and a feature called Showcase which is about richer sharing, those are driving higher and higher adoption of our premium individual plans in the business version of Dropbox.

    A really important part of our strategy is our open ecosystem and our customers love having the freedom to use any different tool or any different ecosystem. That’s a big strength of ours. We’ve announced integrations earlier this year with companies like Google and Salesforce. This quarter we also announced some integrations with companies like Zoom who is a leader in video communication and collaboration. We saw that our Dropbox customers were using all of these products and Zoom found that their customers are using Dropbox. Building a seamless integration is a really powerful way to both increase engagement and then improve the stickiness of our platform.

     

  • Google Creates a Technical Guide for Moving to the Cloud

    Google Creates a Technical Guide for Moving to the Cloud

    Google has created a guide in the form of a website for companies that are considering a move to their cloud called Google Cloud Platform for Data Center Professionals.

    “We recognize that a migration of any size can be a challenging project, so today we’re happy to announce the first part of a new resource to help our customers as they migrate,” said Peter-Mark Verwoerd,a Solutions Architect at Google who previously worked for Amazon Web Services. “This is a guide for customers who are looking to move to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and are coming from non-cloud environments.”

    The guide focuses on the basics of running IT — Compute, Networking, Storage, and Management. “We’ve tried to write this from the point of view of someone with minimal cloud experience, so we hope you find this guide a useful starting point,” said Verwoerd.

  • Google Drive For Mac/PC Gets Helpful New Features

    Google announced some new features for Google Drive for Mac/PC, the app that syncs files on your computer with Google Drive.

    You can now select what you sync and get new warnings to help you take better care of shared files and folders.

    “Drive can store terabytes (upon terabytes) but there’s a good chance your computer’s hard drive will run out of space if you sync everything. Fortunately, you can now select which folders or subfolders you want to sync — and deselect the ones you don’t,” says product manager Aakash Sahney. “When you deselect a folder, it’ll be removed from your computer but still kept safely in Drive. And Drive shows you the size of each folder, so you’ll know how much space you’re freeing up.”

    “After you sync your files, Drive makes it easy to move and delete items directly from your computer,” Sahney adds. “But doing that with shared files can cause others to lose access. Now, Drive warns you when this might happen.”

    The updates will roll out over the coming week.

    Image via Google

  • Amazon Launches Cloud Drive Unlimited Storage in Canada

    Amazon Launches Cloud Drive Unlimited Storage in Canada

    Amazon announced the launch of unlimited storage with Amazon Cloud Drive to customers in Canada. They’re offering two storage plans including unlimited storage and unlimited photos.

    The former plan is $59.99 per year, and the latter is $11.99 per year. Both plans come with free 3-month trials.

    “With the unlimited plans, customers no longer need to worry about how much storage is needed to keep their content safe and secure—they can choose either the Unlimited Storage Plan or Unlimited Photos Plan and only pay one flat fee per year,” the company says. “All their content is securely stored and available for download at their original size and resolution, so memories are protected for a lifetime.”

    “Most people have a lifetime of birthdays, vacations, holidays, and everyday moments stored across numerous devices. And, they don’t know how many gigabytes of storage they need to back all of them up,” says Josh Petersen, Director of Amazon Cloud Drive. “With the two new plans we are introducing today, customers don’t need to worry about storage space—they now have an affordable, secure solution to store unlimited amounts of photos, videos, movies, music, and files in one convenient place.”

    The new plans are available starting today.

  • Dropbox Announces Custom-Built Infrastructure

    Dropbox just unveiled its own custom-built infrastructure, where the company stores and serves their users’ data.

    “With more than half a billion users and over 500 petabytes of data (over 60 times the data stored in the Library of Congress), the company is continuing to invest heavily in building the very best collaboration tools to simplify peoples’ lives,” a spokesperson tells WebProNews.

    The company says with its new infrastructure it’s storing and serving over 90% of user data. In all, Dropbox stores two kinds of data: file content and metadata about files and users.

    “We’ve always had a hybrid cloud architecture, hosting metadata and our web servers in data centers we manage, and storing file content on Amazon,” explains Dropbox’s Akhil Gupta in a blog post. “We were an early adopter of Amazon S3, which provided us with the ability to scale our operations rapidly and reliably. Amazon Web Services has, and continues to be, an invaluable partner—we couldn’t have grown as fast as we did without a service like AWS. As the needs of our users and customers kept growing, we decided to invest seriously in building our own in-house storage system.”

    The company says having its own custom infrastructure enables it to improve performance for its own use case and that it enables them to leverage their scale to customize hardware and software, and “provide better unit economics.”

    More on how Dropbox put this together can be found here.

    Image via Dropbox

  • Dropbox Hits 500 Million Users (And Other Stats)

    Dropbox announced that it has surpassed the 500 million user milestone. That’s registered users.

    Naturally, in celebration, the company released an infographic loaded with stats.

    For example, Dropbox users have created 3.3 billion connections (by sharing with each other), which is up 51% for the last year. 44% of new accounts were opened when existing users introduced people to Dropbox.

    “What they’re achieving never ceases to amaze us. Over 65% of the filmmakers at this year’s Sundance Film Festival told us that Dropbox is integral to their work. Mining industry manufacturer GIW Industries is using Dropbox to speed turnaround time for customers. And News Corp’s 25,000-plus employees have made Dropbox part of their increasingly cloud-centric workflows,” the company says in a blog post.

    Image via Dropbox

  • Google Compute Engine Ups Storage Limits

    Google Compute Engine Ups Storage Limits

    Google announced that it is increasing the size limits of all Google Compute Engine block storage products, including Local SSD and both types of Persistent Disk.

    You can get up to 64TB of Persistent Disk per VM for most machine types including standard and SSD-backed Persistent Disk. The volume size limit has also increased to 64TB. As Google notes, this eliminates the need to stripe disks for larger volumes.

    “Persistent Disk provides fantastic price-performance and offers excellent usability for workloads that rely on durable block storage,” says Google’s John Barrus. “Persistent Disk SSD delivers 30 IOPS per 1 GB provisioned, up to 15,000 IOPS per instance. Persistent Disk Standard is great value at $0.04 per GB-mo and provides 0.75 read IOPS per GB and 1.5 write IOPS per GB. Performance limits are set at an instance level, and can be achieved with just a single Persistent Disk.”

    They’ve also increased the amount of Local SSD that can be attached to a single VM to 3TB. You can attach twice as many partitions of Local SSD to Compute Engine instances (beta). Up to 8 375GB partitions or 3TB of high IOPS SSD can now be attached to a machine with at least one virtual CPU.

    “The new, larger SSD has the same incredible IOPS performance we announced in January, topping out at 680,000 random 4K read IOPS and 360,000 random 4K write IOPS,” says Barrus. “With Local SSD you can achieve multiple millions of operations per second for key-value stores and a million writes per second using as few as 50 servers on NoSQL databases.”

    Local SSD is still $0.218 per GB/month.

    Images via Google

  • Microsoft Announces New Cloud Storage Options For Office Mobile, Office Online

    Microsoft Announces New Cloud Storage Options For Office Mobile, Office Online

    Nearly a year ago, Microsoft announced the Cloud Storage Partner Program for Office, enabling third-party storage providers like Box, Citrix ShareFile, and Salesforce to connect their services to Office Online for document viewing and editing. This followed a previously announced partnership with Dropbox.

    On Wednesday, the company announced that it’s making Office easier for customers to use with such cloud storage providers by adding real-time co-authoring with Office Online for documents stored in partner cloud services. They’re extending Office for iOS integration to al partners in the program, enabling integration between Outlook.com and storage services.

    “Since 2013, we’ve offered real-time co-authoring with Office Online documents stored in Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint Online,” says Microsoft’s Kirk Koenigsbauer. “Today, we are extending this capability to cloud storage providers in the CSPP program. Real-time co-authoring with Office Online is now available for users whose documents are stored in Box, Citrix ShareFile, Dropbox and Egnyte. Also starting today, any other partner in the CSPP program can enable real-time co-authoring using standard interfaces.”

    “Starting today, in addition to Dropbox, we’re offering all CSPP partners the opportunity to tightly integrate with Office for iOS,” he adds. “This integration lets users designate these partner cloud services as “places” in Office, just as they can with Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox. Users can now browse for PowerPoint, Word and Excel files on their favorite cloud service right from within an Office app. They can open, edit or create in these apps with confidence that their files will be updated right in the cloud. Users can also open Office files from their cloud storage app in Office, then save any changes directly back to the cloud. We’ll follow with other mobile platforms later this year.”

    Microsoft also announced that Dropbox and Box Outlook integrations, which it has offered in mobile apps in the past, are now coming to users of the new Outlook.com so they can attach files from these services right from their inboxes.

    Images via Microsoft

  • Google Apps Admins Get More File Sharing Control

    Google announced the addition of a new “Access Checker” feature in the settings in the admin console in Google Apps. This is designed to give admins greater control over sharing options of employees.

    You can access this by going to Admin console > Apps > Google Apps > Settings for Drive > Sharing settings.

    Admins will have three options for how their users can share. These include: Recipients only, their domain ,or public (no Google account required), recipients only or their domain, and recipients only.

    “For example, if an admin chooses option 1 and an employee in their domain attaches a Google Sheets spreadsheet to an event in Calendar, that employee will be asked if they want to share that spreadsheet with guests of the event only or one of two additional options: (1) anyone in their domain with the link (if all guests are in their domain), or (2) anyone with the link (if any guests are in different domains),” Google explains.

    Admins who allow external, public sharing will see “recipients only, their domain, or public” as the default option. If the admin prohibits external, pubic sharing, they’ll be able to choose from “Recipients only or their domain” or “Recipients only”.

    “It’s important to note that the sharing options shown to users will be determined based on the settings in the document owner’s domain, which may not be the same as the settings in the domain of the person sharing the file,” Google says. “If someone tries to share multiple files and different policies apply to each (e.g. because the document owners are in different domains), we’ll abide by the least permissive policy when showing options to users. ”

    The new feature should take about three days to fully roll out.

    Image via Google

  • Google Drive Gets New Organizational Features

    Google announced a handful of new organizational features. The company bills them as “improvements that will help you more easily put things where they belong.”

    First off is a new “move” icon for files already in Drive when you’re browsing files. There’s an “Add to My Drive” option for everything else.

    When you preview files, you’ll now see an icon that lets you add the file to any folder in “My Drive”.

    Finally, you can now drag and drop files into folders from search results.

    That’s pretty much it. Nothing earth-shattering, but some helpful tweaks nonetheless.

    Last month, Google announced its commitment of $1 million to fund more grants and independent security research to help make sure it can keep your files safe. It also added some new search features to Google Drive.

    Images via Google

  • Rackspace Gets Office 365 Security And Storage Features

    Rackspace announced that it has added foiur new features to its “fanatical support for Office 365 to enhance storage, security, and cost savings.

    These include email archiving, Azure rights management, extra storage, and Exchange Online Kiosk.

    According to the company, Rackspace email archiving “Advances data protection by allowing customers to automatically archive Office 365 email data with unlimited retention and storage” while Azure rights management “increases data security with mailbox encryption and user rights.”

    The extra storage is an increase of the SharePoint storage limit from 10GB + 500 MB per subscribed user to unlimited storage capacity.

    Office 365 Exchange Online Kiosk is described as a “stand alone offering of an affordable, browser-based version of Exchange, optimal for customers who simply need to send and receive mail without the need for other productivity applications or Outlook access.”

    The company discusses the new integrations further in a blog post here.

    Image via Office 365 (Facebook)

  • Dropbox Adds Recents Feature to Web

    Dropbox Adds Recents Feature to Web

    Dropbox announced that it is rolling out Recents to dropbox.com so web users can quickly access files they’ve recently opened, added, edited, or moved.

    The feature was previously available on iOS, but it’s just now coming to the web version of Dropbox. It debuted in May, and was integrated into iOS 9’s Spotlight Search in October. It will hit Android sometime soon.

    According to the company, iOS users have been finding files significantly faster, which is not hard to believe. Dropbox’s Abhishek Agrawal writes in a blog post:

    Why? Because you don’t need to click through your folder structure every time you want to pull up the file you need at that moment; you don’t even need to remember what folder you saved the file to. For one, that means you can embrace an unorganized Dropbox account. If you don’t have time to regularly sort all your files into their proper Dropbox folders, it’s okay — the files you’re most likely to need will be easy to find in Recents.

    This view also lets you easily pick up where you left off on a different device. For example, if you need to leave the office but aren’t quite finished with that presentation, save it to Dropbox from your work computer. It will be at the top of your Recents page on your tablet, so you can quickly open it and continue working on the train ride home.

    Last week, Dropbox announced a new enterprise version, a partner network and more. Read about all of that here.

  • Dropbox Adds Team Feature To Basic, Pro Accounts

    Dropbox announced a few months ago that it had over 400 million users and that it was in use at over 8 million businesses, though only 100,000 of those were actually Dropbox for Business customers. Now, the company says over 60% of its Basic and Pro users say they’re using the service primarily for work.

    The company just announced the launch of a new team feature for Basic and Pro accounts enabling users to collaborate for work purposes. It’s designed for small teams so they can organize projects, share information, etc.

    Dropbox says the feature will enable you to collaborate from a central place, share things with your team faster, and keep your files where you need them.

    “Put all the information everyone needs in the team folder — and keep them all on the same page. Each team member will automatically get access to files put in this folder for easy collaboration from anywhere,” the company says in a blog post. “Create groups of team members to quickly share with working groups. And if you need to add someone later on, they’ll instantly get access to any folders already shared with the group.”

    ” Everyone can create separate accounts for personal and work files so they can stay focused on getting things done. Both accounts will be available from anywhere — desktop, mobile, and on the web,” it adds.

    Earlier this summer, Dropbox launched file requests as an easy way for users to collect files fromi groups of people. In June, the company put out this infographic looking at a timeline of feature additions.

    Image via Dropbox

  • Google Cloud Storage Gets Offline Media Import / Export

    Google announced the launch of Offline Media Import/Export for Google Cloud Storage, enabling users to load data into any class (Standard, DRA, Nearline) by sending physical media like hard disk drives, tapes, and USB drives to third-party service providers who upload data for you.

    The company says this will be helpful to you if you’re stuck with a slow, unreliable, or expensive internet connection, noting that the service is fast, easy, and includes a chain-of-custody process.

    “It’s faster than doing it yourself,” says product manager Ben Chong. “Popular business DSL plans feature download speeds that exceed 10Mbps (megabits per second). However, upload speeds generally top out at 1Mbps, with most plans providing just 768kbps (kilobits per second) for upload. This means that uploading a single terabyte (TB) of data will take more than 100 days! This also assumes that no one else is using the same network connection. With Offline Media Import/Export, this process can now be completed in days instead of months.”

    “It’s simple: Save and encrypt your data to the media of your choice (hard drives, tapes, etc.) and ship them to the third party service provider through your preferred courier service,” adds Chong. “It’s protected: The encrypted data will be uploaded to Google Cloud Storage using high speed infrastructure. Third party service providers like Iron Mountain can offer a chain-of-custody process for your data. Once data upload is complete, Iron Mountain can send the hard drive back to you, store it within their vault or destroy it.”

    So far, Google only has two third-party service providers listed (Iron Mountain and another that isnt actually named), but presumably this list will grow in time.

    More on Offline Media Import/Export here.

    Image via Google

  • Dropbox Adds Web Bookmarking To Storage Service

    Dropbox Adds Web Bookmarking To Storage Service

    Dropbox made an interesting announcement on Wednesday in that you can now drag and drop web URLs into Dropbox on the web and desktop and open them on any device.

    Screen Shot 2015-08-19 at 4.51.25 PM

    Dropbox positions the feature as ideal for businesses and students for organizing resources, some of which are bound to be web-based. Dropbox’s Shachar Binyamin writes on the company blog:

    This means you can take your bookmarks anywhere, instead of having them confined to a certain browser on a certain computer. But it also means you can organize all your information, no matter the format, into Dropbox folders — so your information is in one central place.

    For example, let’s say you’re planning an event. Your event agency uses Word documents, and your marketing team puts everything in an online company wiki. Instead of checking two (or more) different locations for the information you need, you can put everything in a dedicated Dropbox folder that’s shared with the team — so your wiki URLs are next to your Word docs, which are next to the vendor invoices and the invite design mockups — and everyone can have easy access to all the files they need, on all their devices, from that one Dropbox folder.

    The feature will let you view content from both the iOS and Android apps.

    Dropbox recently said it has over 400 million users and is in use at over 8 million businesses.

    Image via Dropbox

  • Dropbox for Business Gets File Requests Feature

    Last month, Dropbox launched a new feature for file requests so users can more easily collect files of any size from groups on any platform regardless of device. The feature is now available for Dropbox for Business users.

    “File requests are a fast and simple way to collect files from the people you work with,” a spokesperson for the company explains. “Just send one request to as many people as you like, either via email or by giving them a link. Then they can upload a file up to 10 GB in size each — even if they don’t have a Dropbox account — and it’ll go right into your Dropbox.”

    “And with file requests come key admin controls,” the said. “Admins can choose whether or not their team members can create file requests, and they can also view member-specific activity for sending and responding to file requests.”

    The company says file requests are perfect for teachers and professors who need a way to collect papers from students as well as assistants and coordinators who spend time gathering receipts and invoices. The feature is also good for real estate agents who gather hundreds of applications for new properties and event planners who request assets and contracts up until the day of the event, it says. These are just a few examples of course.

    Since first announcing file requests, Dropbox celebrated its 8th birthday and shared a bunch of stats. For one, it has surpassed 400 million registered users. It says users are taking Dropbox to work at over 8 million businesses, and that there are over 100,000 actual Dropbox for Business customers.

    According to the company, users sync 1.2 billion files every day, create over 100,000 new shared folders and links every hour, and make 4,000 edits every second.

    Image via Dropbox

  • With Over 400M Users, Dropbox Is In Use At Over 8M Businesses

    Dropbox is celebrating its 8th birthday by sharing a bunch of stats, including the fact that it has surpassed 400 million registered users. According to the company, users are taking Dropbox to work at over 8 million businesses. They also have 100,000 actual Dropbox for Business customers.

    “It’s been eight years since Drew Houston submitted his Y Combinator application in the summer of 2007,” a spokesperson for Dropbox said in an email. “Today, Dropbox is excited to announce that they now have more than 400 million registered users. There are now 50 countries around the world in which at least 1 million individuals have Dropbox accounts.”

    “While it started off as a way to give people simple, secure access to their files anytime, anywhere, today Dropbox has become a place where people create amazing things together,” the added. “There’s a shift in how people are using our products: over a quarter of our users are using Dropbox to create, share, and collaborate on content.”

    According to the company, users sync 1.2 billion files every day, create over 100,000 new shared folders and links every hour, and make 4,000 edits every second.

    “When Dropbox for Business first launched, companies used Dropbox primarily for on-the-go access and backup. But over the past two years, we’ve seen their usage of Dropbox evolve,” the spokesperson said. “Today, companies like National Geographic use Dropbox to share tens of thousands of large images from far flung locations with their photo editors in Washington, D.C. and Under Armour uses Dropbox to exchange large design files with its manufacturing partners in Asia, increasing the speed of production and reducing the time it takes to bring new fashions to the market.”

    Here’s an infographic showing Dropbox’s progress over the years:

    dropbox

    Of its business tools, the company said in a blog post, “We’re committed to building simple, secure technology for businesses that employees love using. Over the past year, we’ve brought you a better way to manage teams with Groups, better sharing controls, and powerful integrations with best-in-class tools for eDiscovery, DLP, and other business-critical applications thanks to the Dropbox for Business API. And just today we announced more management and security features for IT.”

    Dropbox has ten global offices and a team of over 1,200 people.

    Images via Dropbox

  • Dropbox Adds File Requests For Collecting Files From Groups

    Dropbox announced a new feature for file requests so users can more easily collect files of any size from groups on any platform regardless of device.

    “Existing solutions to collect files – email, text messaging, social media, FTP servers, or even physically mailing hard drives – are clunky and often limited by file size,” a Dropbox spokesperson tells WebProNews. “Dropbox’s file requests is a simple, seamless solution that eliminates the back and forth and takes care of the organizing for you, right in your Dropbox account.”

    file-requests

    “With file requests, gathering photos, docs, and more from a group of people is simple,” the spokesperson says. “Need to collect bids from your contractor or create a family cookbook for your sister’s bridal shower? Just send out a link, and watch the files show up in your Dropbox for your eyes only. Whether you’re requesting items from your tech-savvy cousin or your tech-challenged mom, submitters won’t even need to create a Dropbox account to partake. The best part? Dropbox takes care of the organizing for you by adding the name of each submitter to the files they send in.”

    To use the feature, just go to dropbox.com/requests to send out requests. It’s currently available to Dropbox basic and Pro users, but will be released to business customers in the next few weeks, we’re told.

    The FAQ has a basic walkthrough for the feature in case you have any trouble.

    Images via Dropbox

  • Amazon Redshift Now Lets You Get More For Your Money

    First unveiled in 2012, Amazon made petabyte-scale data warehouse service Amazon Redshift available to all Amazon Web Services customers in 2013. Last year, it got faster data nodes.

    Now, Amazon has announced that it is making Dense Storage with Redshift faster and more cost-effective with a second-generation instance type, DS2. This has twice the memory and compute power of DS1, which was previously known as DW1, with the same amount of storage. DS2 also supports Enhanced Networking and offers 50% more disk throughput than DS1.

    According to Amazon, DS2 also provides 50% better performance while maintaining the same pricing. Here’s a look at that, by the way:

    “We expect existing DS1 customers to quickly adopt DS2. There’s really no reason not to,” says Amazon Web Services’ Tina Adams. “To move from DS1 to DS2, simply restore a DS2 cluster from a snapshot of a DS1 cluster of the same size. Restoring from snapshot is a push-button operation in our Console. Our streaming restore feature allows you to resume querying as soon as your new cluster is created, while data is streamed from S3 in the background. After the restore completes, if you’d like, you can resize your DS2 cluster with a few clicks.”

    “You now have three Reserved Instance payment options!” Adams adds. “This gives you the flexibility to determine how much you wish to pay upfront. To purchase these offerings simply visit the Reserved Nodes tab in our Console.”

    There are three options: No Upfront, Partial Upfront, and All Upfront. No Upfront means you don’t pay anything upfront, but commit to pay hourly over the course of a year at a 20% discount over On-Demand. The option is only available for a one-year term. Partial Upfront is the same as Redshift’s previous heavy utilization offering, in which you pay a portion of the Reserved Instance upfront and the rest over a one or three year term. The discount can be up to 41% for a year or 73% for three. All Upfront obviously means that you pay for the entire Reserved Instance term (1 or 3 years) at once upfront. It offers a discount of up to 42% for a year or 76% for three compared to On-Demand.

    Adams says Amazon has more Redshift news on the way. Here’s a recent presentation from the company on how to build your own data warehouse with the product.

    Images via Amazon