Oracle’s Big Data Appliance is now for sale, featuring Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution and management tools. Regardless of what anybody thinks about Oracle’s strategy, the deal is a coup for Cloudera as it tries to fend off competition from fellow Hadoop startups Hortonworks and MapR. Read more »
I spent some time playing with Google Insights to find out what parts of the country are most interested in technology and when that interest hit its peak. It wasn’t surprising to see Silicon Valley rank highly, but did you know Utah was into next-generation programming? Read more »
AT&T has decided to build another cloud, this one focusing on developers and, ultimately, incorporating elements of the open-source OpenStack project. It’s an ambitious undertaking as AT&T tries to prove it can hang with the big boys in delivering cloud infrastructure to the masses. Read more »
1010data says it now hosts more than 5 trillion records for its customers. If 1010data’s growth is a microcosm of the greater market, it’s no wonder there’s so much excitement around scalable data stores such as Hadoop, NoSQL databases and massively parallel analytic databases. Read more »
In the world of science, cloud computing provides an ideal platform for crowdsourcing scientific problems across the whole world of researchers, giving them access to data sets and the computing resources to analyze them. If big data is any indicator, scientific crowdsourcing should catch on. Read more »
All startup activity around cloud computing in the past few years has been great, but it also means there’s precious little room on the playing field for newcomers. Here are 10 cloud startups launched in 2011 that have a chance to make it big in 2012. Read more »
I made a lot of predictions about cloud computing and the general IT infrastructure space heading into 2011, and I impressed myself with my skills of prognostication. Of course, it’s possible I’m just grading myself too generously, so I’ll let readers be the judges. Read more »
What if the answer to all the political theatre surrounding SOPA was an amendment forcing copyright holders to put their money where there mouths are? Some of SOPA’s terribly harsh penalties for infringement can stay, but making false allegations would cost accusers dearly. Read more »
Mu Sigma has closed a $108 million investment round to expand its analytics-outsourcing business. Mu Sigma takes customers’ data and it turns it into business insights, meaning customers don’t have to built their own in-house big data expertise. It’s an already-profitable business that’s only getting bigger. Read more »
It’s not 1982 anymore. Twenty-nine years after co-founding Sun Microsystems — a company that once boasted a $200 billion market cap — McNealy is a known commodity in the Valley, and that makes life a lot easier when it’s time to launch a new venture. Read more »
While the rest of the IT world is reeling from the hard drive shortage, users of cloud computing services should have a relatively painless experience — even if their providers don’t. Joyent’s Steve Tuck talks about his experience and how the HDD shortage might affect the industry. Read more »
Google announced that it’s ending its Academic Cloud Computing Initiative, a joint program with IBM and the National Science Foundation that gave researchers access to a massive Hadoop cluster on which to run their data-intensive projects. The company says access to such resources is now common. Read more »
Cloudability, a startup that bills itself as “Mint.com for the cloud,” has raised $1.1 million in seed funding for its service that helps companies keep an eye on their cloud-computing spending. It recently let one user spot an exploit that could have cost the company dearly. Read more »
Ask Box.net CEO Aaron Levie about his company’s cloud storage business, and you’ll hear a long, excited answer that probably won’t include the word “storage” at all. He’ll talk about sharing, collaboration and universal access — anything but the core storage infrastructure that makes Box’s service possible. Read more »
Social media sites like Facebook have been criticized as catering to users’ own deluded senses of self-importance, but a current lawsuit against Facebook might prove social media users are important. Within circles of friends, in fact, users might be considered celebrities–which has big legal implications. Read more »
Money has turned the Hadoop community, once united under the Apache banner and the cuddly stuffed-toy-elephant logo, into something resembling a frat house: Everyone’s under the same roof, but there’s plenty of machismo to go around. If it’s not good business; it is good theater. Read more »
At last week’s MongoSV conference in Santa Clara, Calif., a number of users shared their experiences with the MongoDB NoSQL database. One common theme: NoSQL is necessary for a lot of use cases, but it’s not for companies afraid of hard work. Read more »
If big data does indeed write the screenplay for the movie about the next generation of business, the climax will be that mathematicians take the prom queen home. If students want high-paying jobs with the coolest companies around, they’d better heed that prediction. Read more »
Application developers can now use one API to access data from Factual’s marketplace that contains data on more than 55 million places worldwide. It’s not data nirvana just yet, but Factual points to what our data-driven future might look like. Read more »
Virtustream, a fast-growing enteprise cloud provider, is buying cloud-computing pioneer Enomaly for an undisclosed amount. Enomaly, which launched in 2003, sells one of the first private-cloud management products, Elastic Computing Platform, and in the last year launched an infrastructure resource exchange called SpotCloud. Read more »
Beyond Hadoop, there’s a lot more to think about when it comes to big data, ranging from where companies will actually find workers to how they’ll deal with an impending privacy-policy onslaught. The answers won’t be easy to come by, but they could be critical. Read more »
Up-and-coming Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider Tier3 has made a significant contribution to the Platform-as-a-Service world by releasing a .NET implementation of the Cloud Foundry PaaS project. A fork project called Iron Foundry will serve as the primary source of .NET development within Cloud Foundry. Read more »
SOASTA has raised a $12 million Series D round as a throng of competitors jockeys for position behind it. SOASTA’s vision of using cloud resources for load testing is very relevant today as new applications web, mobile and even Facebook applications pop up by the minute. Read more »
Never content with good enough when it comes to speed, Facebook has taken its open-source PHP-boosting HipHop technology to the next level for programmers. With the new HipHop Virtual Machine, Facebook claims it has improved upon HipHop interpreter performance by 60 percent. Read more »
Microsoft added fuel to speculations about its consumer-business prowess on Tuesday with the preview of its forthcoming Windows Store that will accompany Windows 8, but there’s a more fundamental issue facing Microsoft than whether consumers will buy Windows 8 devices. Will it have developers? Read more »
If there’s one thing Claudia Kotcha will tell you about building apps that employees want to use, it’s to think about your employees really want. Kotcha ought to know — she spent years creating products that millions of actual consumers loved. Read more »
When it comes to users, transparency is important for taking reputation with them across sites. Being chattygirl32 in the New York Times comments section isn’t so helpful when you try to leverage online reputation elsewhere. A real name, however, might stick. Read more »
With so many remote workers using so many different cloud-based services to manage every aspect of their jobs, it’s possible companies are losing access to lots of valuable information. That means there’s a business opportunity for someone willing to step up and solve the problem. Read more »
Greenplum has announced its Unified Analytics Platform, a packaging of the Greenplum Database and Hadoop distribution along with its long-awaited Chorus software. Chorus is really what ties everything together, providing a platform to explore both types of data and to share interesting data sets and findings. Read more »
Facebook held a Tech Talk on Monday night explaining how it built a MySQL environment capable of handling everything the company needs in terms of scale, performance and availability. Based on what I heard, it looks like critics of Facebook’s MySQL environment might be wrong. Read more »
According to a new survey by CSC, cloud computing is not the money saver it’s sometimes made out to be. But don’t fret — it’s still a very valuable delivery model for IT resources. The cloud brings with a wealth of benefits around mobility, efficiency and jobs. Read more »
However it’s defined, the concept of big data ultimately boils down to money. But I think there’s a line we shouldn’t cross when it comes to using analytics to squeeze every last dollar out of an operation. It’s between things we want and things we need. Read more »
Analyst powerhouses IDC and Gartner both rolled out their latest cloud computing and big data predictions and statistics Thursday morning, and while some are bold, others should have you saying “Duh.” Here’s what they have to say, and how that squares with what I’m seeing. Read more »
Silk, the browser for Amazon’s new Kindle Fire, utilizes Amazon’s cloud. But don’t think AWS is the Kindle Fire’s only cloud connection. In a post on Tuesday, Pulse’s Greg Bayer explained how his company’s news-reading app actually runs atop Google’s App Engine Platform-as-a-Service offering. Read more »
HPCC Systems, the division of LexisNexis that’s pushing a big-data processing-and-delivery platform to compete with Hadoop, has tuned its software to run on Amazon’s cloud computing platform. Interested developers can now experiment with the open source software without having to wrangle physical servers. Read more »
Last week, a European court struck down a rule forcing a Belgian ISP to monitor traffic for copyright infringement. Experts believe the decision could help rein in the spread of SOPA-like laws throughout Europe. So why is the U.S. rushing headling into deeply flawed legislation? Read more »
According to data released today as part of Cisco’s Global Cloud Index, traffic over data center networks will reach 4.8 zettabytes a year by 2015, and cloud computing will account for one-third of it, or 1.6 zettabytes. That’s more than all the Internet will handle. Read more »
Today, I read a press release from Sourcefire touting its “big data” approach to security and the fact that its Immunet anti-malware-for-PCs product is now monitoring 2 million endpoints. I reached out to find out what’s under Immunet’s covers and, no surprise, found Hadoop. Read more »
The proposed Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, garners a lot of hatred from commentators and the Internet industry as whole, but it’s only the next logical step after the problematic Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the safe harbor of which is more like a plea bargain. Read more »
Hadoop gets plenty of attention from investors and the IT press, but it’s very possible we haven’t seen anything yet. All the action of the last year has just been setting the stage for what should be a big year. Read more »
