As customers evaluate cloud based storage solutions, one challenge has been moving large amounts of data in and out of blob storage in a cost effective, secure and speedy manner. Today, we are excited to announce the preview of Windows Azure Import/Export, a new service that solves this challenge.

With this new service, customers can place requests to ship encrypted data in hard disk drives through FedEx to our data centers, where Microsoft’s high-speed internal network is used to transfer the data to or from the customers’ blob storage account.

All data shipped using Import/Export is encrypted using BitLocker, where the customer holds the key, ensuring safe transport of information. This experience is integrated within the portal making it easy to create and manage the Import/Export jobs.

Learn more about the Import/Export service by visiting the services page and Scott Guthrie’s blog.

If you have not done so, I also encourage you to learn more about the General Availability of Windows Azure HDInsight that we announced last week. With Windows Azure HDInsight, you can deploy an Apache Hadoop cluster for big data processing and leverage powerful programming and insight tools to surface new business insights.

For more information about the HDInsight service, visit the HDInsight Service webpage.

To get started with HDInsight, visit the Windows Azure Management Portal.

Today, we are also announcing several enhancements to our Web and Mobile solution scenarios that provide a richer set of capabilities for developers to create and manage applications.

1. Highly Personalized Push Notifications in Notification Hubs: Addition of tag expressions that enable broadcasting push notifications to any subset of users definable with a Boolean expression.
2. Mobile Application Performance Monitoring from New Relic: Real time visibility into usage, performance, errors and throughput end to end from the mobile client to mobile service back-end using New Relic Mobile Monitoring.
3. Preview of Windows Azure Scheduler:  Creation, scheduling and execution of jobs to reliably call services either inside or outside of Windows Azure.
4. Release of PHP 5.5 On Windows Azure: Benefit from the additional performance and stability when building PHP web applications with Windows Azure Web Sites and Cloud Services.
5. WebSockets on Windows Azure Web Sites: Enable real time features in web applications leveraging native WebSockets support in modern browsers.

For further details on the release of these enhancements, please visit Scott Guthrie’s blog.