Alibaba Group plans to invest in Singapore data centre
The deal is part of its US$1 billion investment to drive the growth of Aliyun, its cloud computing arm.
SINGAPORE: Chinese Web giant Alibaba Group on Thursday (Jul 30) announced it will set up data centres in Singapore, as well as Japan, Europe and the Middle East, as part of its US$1 billion investment to drive the growth of its cloud computing arm Aliyun.
In a press release, Alibaba Group CEO Daniel Zhang said Aliyun will serve as an "essential engine" for the company in the new economy which sees the physical and digital arenas becoming increasingly integrated.
"This additional US$1 billion investment is just the beginning. Our hope is for Aliyun to continually empower customers and partners with new capabilities, and help companies upgrade their basic infrastructure," Mr Zhang said. "We want to enable businesses to connect directly with consumers and drive productivity using data."
To do so, it plans to expand its data centre footprint from the five in China and Hong Kong, as well as one in the Silicon Valley in the US.
When asked, Alibaba spokesperson Beckie Wang said in an email that there are no further details on the Singapore data centre currently, such as whether it would be building one from scratch or leasing space from data centre operators here.
Besides data centres, Alibaba Group also has its international Marketplace Alliance Program, a channel programme that offers Aliyun cloud computing services via partners such as Singapore's Singtel.
- CNA/kk
- wong chee tat :)
Showing posts with label cloud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cloud. Show all posts
Monday, August 3, 2015
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Banks expected to enhance e-banking experience with new gadgets
Banks expected to enhance e-banking experience with new gadgets
By Yvonne Chan | Posted: 07 November 2012 2317 hrs
SINGAPORE : Consumers may soon have more options for mobile banking and making online transactions.
This comes as Singapore banks are expected to come up with more innovative gadgets to boost the "e-banking" experience.
But industry watchers have said developments in cloud computing may provide significant challenges in this arena.
Banks are expected to set aside more money to ensure peace of mind for customers when carrying out online transactions.
This comes after industry-wide measures introduced by the Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS), which called for additional authentication features on a security token to maximise security for online and mobile banking transactions.
Next January, Standard Chartered Bank Singapore will be introducing a multi-function token card which combines both the security token and credit card features.
Subba Vaidyanathan, regional head of Retail Banking Segments (Singapore and South East Asia) at Standard Chartered Bank, said: "Our big focus is to keep building on the digital bank and provide that service, because that is where we see Singapore banks and Singaporeans moving.
"We have continued to have 30-40 per cent annualised growth on payments online and we want to sustain that pace."
So far, 170,000 Standard Chartered customers have opted for the card, and its rollout will start in January 2013.
The multi-function token acts as a debit, credit and ATM card. It also doubles up as a security token to facilitate online banking. And with banks projected to increase their spending on technology next year, analysts said customers can expect more innovations wrapped up in one device, such as being able to check one's bank account balance while on the go.
Meanwhile, Citibank has just launched a new service that allows its customers to pay their credit card bills via SMS on mobile phones.
Earlier, DBS Bank also introduced the DBS One.TAP, Singapore's first virtual credit card on a mobile phone.
But banks do have other kinds of competitors to contend with.
Edison Chen, investment analyst at DMG & Partners Research, said: "We do see the effect of cloud-based banking. There are third-party, non-bank parties that are offering financial services that bypass the banks in utilising the fact that cloud computing offers lower barriers of entry, and that is something that banks must watch out for.
"So they must constantly upgrade their facilities and offer the best of what customers really want. And we do see that happening, in terms of banks embracing social networking, having their Facebook closely linked with customers and analysing what customers want and need."
Some industry watchers said this may prompt banks to upgrade facilities and eventually utilise cloud computing elements.
- CNA/ms
- wong chee tat :)
By Yvonne Chan | Posted: 07 November 2012 2317 hrs
SINGAPORE : Consumers may soon have more options for mobile banking and making online transactions.
This comes as Singapore banks are expected to come up with more innovative gadgets to boost the "e-banking" experience.
But industry watchers have said developments in cloud computing may provide significant challenges in this arena.
Banks are expected to set aside more money to ensure peace of mind for customers when carrying out online transactions.
This comes after industry-wide measures introduced by the Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS), which called for additional authentication features on a security token to maximise security for online and mobile banking transactions.
Next January, Standard Chartered Bank Singapore will be introducing a multi-function token card which combines both the security token and credit card features.
Subba Vaidyanathan, regional head of Retail Banking Segments (Singapore and South East Asia) at Standard Chartered Bank, said: "Our big focus is to keep building on the digital bank and provide that service, because that is where we see Singapore banks and Singaporeans moving.
"We have continued to have 30-40 per cent annualised growth on payments online and we want to sustain that pace."
So far, 170,000 Standard Chartered customers have opted for the card, and its rollout will start in January 2013.
The multi-function token acts as a debit, credit and ATM card. It also doubles up as a security token to facilitate online banking. And with banks projected to increase their spending on technology next year, analysts said customers can expect more innovations wrapped up in one device, such as being able to check one's bank account balance while on the go.
Meanwhile, Citibank has just launched a new service that allows its customers to pay their credit card bills via SMS on mobile phones.
Earlier, DBS Bank also introduced the DBS One.TAP, Singapore's first virtual credit card on a mobile phone.
But banks do have other kinds of competitors to contend with.
Edison Chen, investment analyst at DMG & Partners Research, said: "We do see the effect of cloud-based banking. There are third-party, non-bank parties that are offering financial services that bypass the banks in utilising the fact that cloud computing offers lower barriers of entry, and that is something that banks must watch out for.
"So they must constantly upgrade their facilities and offer the best of what customers really want. And we do see that happening, in terms of banks embracing social networking, having their Facebook closely linked with customers and analysing what customers want and need."
Some industry watchers said this may prompt banks to upgrade facilities and eventually utilise cloud computing elements.
- CNA/ms
- wong chee tat :)
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Monday, November 7, 2011
Friday, November 4, 2011
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Fix to prevent repeat of May outage of Google’s cloud to sacrifice performance
Fix to prevent repeat of May outage of Google’s cloud to sacrifice performance
Company releases detailed account of the App Engine outage and explains lessons learned (6/10/2010)
The team that operates App Engine,
Google’s cloud-based application development platform, said its highest
priority after fixing the latency problems that caused the platform to
grind to a halt for more than 2.5 hours in May would be creating an
alternative configuration of Datastore, the cloud database offered as
part of the App Engine service that caused the outage.
“It is critical to offer an alternative configuration of the Datastore,” the team wrote in an outage post-mortem released Thursday. “This implementation should be much less susceptible to outages and will prevent any replication loss during outages, but will trade off performance.”
The incident began when Datastore started seeing increased latency caused by infrastructure instability around 12:30 p.m. on May 25. The latency resulted in write replication to the secondary data center to slow “to a crawl.” The App Engine team began the failover procedure about five minutes after the latency increase was noticed. By 1:05 p.m., read queries were being served out of the secondary data center and about 10 minutes later the team made an external announcement of the outage.
Another 10 minutes later, the secondary data center began serving both read and write traffic, however, latency is still causing a high rate of request time-outs. By 2:20 p.m. all applications, except the large ones, stabilized and by 3:10 p.m., all applications returned to a normal sate of operation.
Here’s what caused it:
A repository component of Bigtable (a distributed storage system) that determines location of entities in the distributed system became overloaded because of instability in the compute cluster. The overload prevented requests from knowing where to send Datastore operations in time to avoid read and write request time-outs, which occur 30 seconds after a request is made.
Delays in processing of Datastore requests caused other requests to stack-up beyond App Engine’s safety limit, causing all App Engine requests to fail.
Because of the outage, some writes created by the primary Datastore were not applied to the secondary Datastore during failover, “causing the mirror image between the primary and secondary Datastore to be out of sync.” Google said its team will contact all administrators whose applications were affected and instruct them to take appropriate action. The company said two percent of all applications were affected.
- wong chee tat :)
Company releases detailed account of the App Engine outage and explains lessons learned (6/10/2010)
The team that operates App Engine,
Google’s cloud-based application development platform, said its highest
priority after fixing the latency problems that caused the platform to
grind to a halt for more than 2.5 hours in May would be creating an
alternative configuration of Datastore, the cloud database offered as
part of the App Engine service that caused the outage.“It is critical to offer an alternative configuration of the Datastore,” the team wrote in an outage post-mortem released Thursday. “This implementation should be much less susceptible to outages and will prevent any replication loss during outages, but will trade off performance.”
The incident began when Datastore started seeing increased latency caused by infrastructure instability around 12:30 p.m. on May 25. The latency resulted in write replication to the secondary data center to slow “to a crawl.” The App Engine team began the failover procedure about five minutes after the latency increase was noticed. By 1:05 p.m., read queries were being served out of the secondary data center and about 10 minutes later the team made an external announcement of the outage.
Another 10 minutes later, the secondary data center began serving both read and write traffic, however, latency is still causing a high rate of request time-outs. By 2:20 p.m. all applications, except the large ones, stabilized and by 3:10 p.m., all applications returned to a normal sate of operation.
Here’s what caused it:
A repository component of Bigtable (a distributed storage system) that determines location of entities in the distributed system became overloaded because of instability in the compute cluster. The overload prevented requests from knowing where to send Datastore operations in time to avoid read and write request time-outs, which occur 30 seconds after a request is made.
Delays in processing of Datastore requests caused other requests to stack-up beyond App Engine’s safety limit, causing all App Engine requests to fail.
Because of the outage, some writes created by the primary Datastore were not applied to the secondary Datastore during failover, “causing the mirror image between the primary and secondary Datastore to be out of sync.” Google said its team will contact all administrators whose applications were affected and instruct them to take appropriate action. The company said two percent of all applications were affected.
- wong chee tat :)
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