10.18.16
Amazon Web Services, Inc., an Amazon.com company, today announced the availability of the US East (Ohio) Region to customers looking to build their businesses and run applications on infrastructure on the AWS Cloud. Along with US East (N. Virginia), the US East (Ohio) Region provides low latency across the eastern and central United States (US). With this launch, AWS now provides 38 Availability Zones across 14 technology infrastructure regions globally. In the United States alone, AWS now has 16 Availability Zones across five regions. AWS has announced that another nine Availability Zones and four regions in Canada, the UK, France, and China are planned to come online in the coming months. Starting today, developers, startups, enterprises, government agencies, and non-profit organizations around the world can sign up and get started using the US East (Ohio) Region at: http://aws.amazon.com.
For more than a decade, AWS has changed the way organizations acquire technology infrastructure. AWS customers are not required to make any up-front financial or long-term commitments. They can turn capital expense into variable operating expense, scale quickly and seamlessly by adding or shedding resources at any time, get to market much more quickly with new and critical ideas, and free up scarce engineering resources from the undifferentiated heavy lifting of running backend infrastructure—all without sacrificing operational performance, reliability, or security. This has led to more than a million customers adopting the AWS Cloud in over 190 countries around the world.
“Our customers tell us that by running their applications in the AWS Cloud, they are able to move faster, operate more securely, and save substantial costs–all while leveraging the scale and performance of AWS,” said Peter DeSantis, Vice President, Infrastructure at AWS. “Now with five highly scalable regions across the United States, AWS customers have multiple options for providing US-based end users low-latency access to cloud applications, as well as the opportunity to architect a variety of inter-region backup and disaster recovery operations for even greater availability.”
The US East (Ohio) Region consists of three separate Availability Zones at launch. Availability Zones refer to data centers in separate, distinct locations within a single region that are engineered to be operationally independent of other Availability Zones, with independent power, cooling, and physical security, and are connected via a low latency network. AWS customers focused on high availability can architect their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even higher reliability and fault tolerance. For customers looking for inter-region redundancy, the new AWS US East (Ohio) Region, in conjunction with the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), and US West (N. California) Regions gives them flexibility to architect across multiple AWS Regions within the United States.
Recognizing that the AWS Cloud has become the new normal for companies of all sizes, and across all industries, to deploy their business-critical applications and drive increased agility, Ohio Governor John Kasich was quick to welcome the new AWS Region. In a video statement released by the Governor’s office, Kasich stated, “It’s clear that the world’s economy is moving to digital technologies and cloud computing. And Amazon Web Services’ commitment here demonstrates the leading role that we hope Ohio can play in that world. …Ohio is not just embracing the new knowledge economy, we’re also advancing the technologies on which that economy will thrive.”
Customers welcome the new AWS US East (Ohio) Region
Cardinal Health is a global integrated healthcare services and products company, providing customized solutions for hospital systems, pharmacies, ambulatory surgery centers, clinical laboratories, and physician offices worldwide. Fuse by Cardinal Health focuses on technology and innovation to improve the future of health and wellness. “Fuse leverages services including Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Amazon Redshift, Amazon EBS, and Elastic Load Balancing to more quickly market test ideas and deploy features to our customers,” said Michael Swartzbaugh, Director of Engineering for Fuse by Cardinal Health. “AWS is a market leader in cloud solutions and enables us to use agile methodologies to drive our innovations and platforms. At Fuse, we are able to quickly execute on our IT journey by using the AWS Cloud, and are thrilled to have additional Availability Zones nearby that will provide higher bandwidth and capacity for our customers.”
Socrata is the market leader in cloud-based data democratization solutions that help governments achieve meaningful social and economic impact by making public data easily shared, discovered, used, and actionable. “Socrata hosts the 2017 White House Budget in the Socrata Public Finance Data Cloud, which includes detailed budgeting of over $4 trillion dollars, and allows users to visually explore this data by program area and agency, and create, analyze, and share interactive charts and graphs,” said Kevin Merritt, CEO of Socrata. “Simple and accessible visualizations of this complex data set has allowed for unprecedented citizen engagement. We’ve stopped operating our own data centers and have gone all-in on AWS because it allows us to innovate more rapidly, scale more flexibly, and allocate more of our engineering resources to developing features and capabilities that directly benefit our customers.”
APPRISS is a Louisville, Kentucky-based company leveraging data and analytics solutions in the health, retail, and public safety markets to explore new ways to keep communities safe and informed. “PMP AWARxE, a solution for prescription monitoring programs, provides states with the tools to monitor prescriptions for federally controlled substances,” said Brian Oldham, CIO of APPRISS. “Thirty states are currently onboarding to the program and hosting it on the AWS Cloud enables us to have the uptime and resilience that is necessary to satisfy their needs. We are thrilled to have an additional US region to rely on in the future as we continue to expand our use of the AWS Cloud.”
NaviStone, headquartered in Cincinnati, provides direct and digital marketers with a revolutionary way to target the right web browsers and include them in direct marketing campaigns. Tom White, CTO of Navistone states, “Our big data business would not exist without our ability to leverage AWS’s scale to our clients’ advantage. Our clients include major retailers with multi-channel operations across online, catalog, and brick-and-mortar locations. We can dream big and experiment with innovative products like our web-to-print technology, which helps our clients more accurately target customers and increase conversions. The speed, flexibility, and low cost of AWS enables NaviStone to experiment at a small scale knowing we can bring a product from prototype to full scale rapidly using the AWS Cloud. Navistone has been an AWS customer for the past three years and now are 100 percent all-in on AWS. We welcome AWS’s expansion in Ohio as this will continue to expand the community of professionals dedicated to building big data businesses at a time when every organization is becoming more data driven.”
Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland is one of the country’s leading private research institutions, offering a unique combination of forward-thinking educational opportunities in an inspiring cultural setting. With about 11,000 students, the university’s nationally recognized programs include arts and sciences, dental medicine, engineering, law, management, medicine, nursing, and social work. “University Technology, at Case Western Reserve University has begun to re-think and re-design its legacy and enterprise systems, using the AWS Cloud to deliver more agile administrative, teaching, learning, and research support,” said Sue B. Workman, VP University Technology/CIO. “We are further enabling faculty and student success by providing access to AWS’s industry-leading cloud technology and enabling greater return on investment (ROI) on our technology costs. The agility and flexibility provided by AWS gives our students the ability to set up technology systems quickly and with more understanding, allows our researchers to easily set up and tear down experiments, and improves the effectiveness with which we manage our enterprise systems. The commitment AWS is making to Ohio demonstrates its confidence that Ohio is a driver for innovation and technology advancement.”
Investing in Ohio
The AWS US East (Ohio) Region is yet another investment AWS is making in the State of Ohio. Amazon Wind Farm US Central, located in Paulding County, Ohio, is a 100 megawatt (MW) wind farm that is currently under construction. When operational, which is expected by May 2017, Amazon Wind Farm US Central will produce 320,000 megawatt hours of wind energy annually directly onto the grid powering the data centers in the AWS US East (Ohio) Region and other current and future AWS data centers. For more information on Amazon Wind Farm US Central, watch the video or visit AWS’s Sustainability website to learn more about the company’s other wind and solar projects across the US.
In conjunction with the launch of the AWS US East (Ohio) Region, AWS is working with the Ohio Academic Resources Network (OARnet), a state-funded IT organization that provides member organizations with intrastate networking and other IT services. AWS and OARnet have agreed to work together to explore AWS Direct Connect access to Ohio’s 100-gigabit research backbone network called OARnet. By using OARnet’s unique high-speed backbone, colleges, schools, medical research hospitals, and state government can readily take advantage of high-speed network connection to AWS to further advanced research and discovery.
