Microsoft releases Windows Azure Import/Export Service preview

One of the challenges that customers face when evaluating cloud-based storage solutions is to move and move large amounts of data from Blob storage in a cost-effective, secure and fast manner. Today, we are pleased to announce a preview of Windows Azure import/Export, a new service that can address this challenge.

With this new service, customers can ask FedEx to send encrypted data from the hard drive to our data center, which will use Microsoft's high-speed internal network to transfer data to a customer's BLOB store account or to read from a BLOB account.

All data sent using import/export is encrypted using BitLocker, and the key is retained by the customer to ensure secure transmission of the information. This experience is integrated into the portal, making it easy to create and manage import/export jobs.

To learn more about import/export services, visit the service page and the Scott Guthrie blog.

We also recommend that you learn more about last week's announcement of the formal release of Windows Azure Hdinsight If you haven't already done so. With Windows Azure hdinsight, you can deploy the Apache Hadoop cluster for large data processing and use powerful programming and insight tools to find new business insights.

For more information about the Hdinsight service, visit the Hdinsight Services Web page.

To start using Hdinsight, visit the Windows Azure management portal.

Today, we will also announce several enhancements to the WEB and mobile solution scenario that provide developers with a richer set of features for creating and managing applications.

1. Highly personalized push notification in the Notification Hub: Adding tags defined using Boolean expressions can broadcast push notifications to any subset of users.

2. Mobile application performance monitoring via new relic: Use the new Relic Mobile Monitor to view real-time usage, performance, error, and End-to-end throughput from mobile clients to the back-end of mobile services.

3. Windows Azure Scheduler Preview: Create, plan, and execute various jobs to reliably invoke services inside or outside Windows Azure.

4. Publish PHP 5.5 on Windows Azure: Use Windows Azure Web site and cloud services to build PHP Web applications to benefit from additional performance and stability.

5. WebSocket on Windows Azure Web site: Enables real-time functionality in WEB applications supported by native WebSocket in modern browsers.