According to Lou Modano, head of global infrastructure for NASDAQ OMX, there is “a lot of opportunity for new [hardware] players” to feed a ceaseless demand for ever lower latency in electronic trading systems. When you rely entirely on electronic trading, a faster system is key. Read more »
Nimble Storage, a startup selling flash-equipped storage appliance to small businesses, has closed a $25 million Series D round. Nimble’s approach is interesting in that it pushes flash almost more for convenience than for performance, which distinguishes it from high-end plays like Violin Memory. Read more »
At its Cisco Live event today in Las Vegas, Cisco rolled out a range of new features and products designed to convince companies that Cisco is all they need for their cloud network and server needs. But will customers actually buy into Cisco’s vision? Read more »
Heroku might have expanded its embrace to include Node.js and Clojure, but its heart is still with Ruby. To wit, Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto is joining the company as its chief architect for Ruby, which should only improve its standing in the developer community. Read more »
VMware on Tuesday morning launched the latest version of its vSphere virtualization management software, as well as a suite of integrated products for managing cloud computing environments. There isn’t much new aside from the capabilities in vSphere 5, but VMware’s timing was ideal. Read more »
Citrix Systems has bought hot private-cloud startup Cloud.com, a move that immediately makes Citrix a leader in the quest to help companies build on-premise Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds à la Amazon EC2. Cloud.com brings an impressive list of customers that includes Bechtel, GoDaddy and Zynga. Read more »
The service provider responsible for Groupon’s daily e-mail deals, suffered a server outage this weekend that looks to have had a staggering effect on Groupon sales in several cities. This seems to play up Groupon’s overall dependence on emails as the primary method of subscriber interaction. Read more »
Big processors or little processors, scale-up or scale-out, on-premise or in the cloud: the answers might not be as easy as one would think. Web-style, scale-out architectures, low-power server processors and cloud computing are getting more attention by the day, but they have their limits. Read more »
When the smoke clears, Dropbox’s newfound focus on transparency could turn out to be a great thing. Especially if it triggers an avalanche of other web-service providers following in its footsteps, making life easier for consumers and getting the federal government off their backs. Read more »
According to database pioneer Michael Stonebraker, Facebook is operating a huge, complex MySQL implementation equivalent to “a fate worse than death.” It’s actually a predicament all too common among web startups, for which the solution might be a class of databases referred to as NewSQL. Read more »
Virtustream, a cloud computing provider focused on hosting enterprise applications, has raised $10 million in a Series B round. The round was funded by existing investors Intel Capital, Columbia Capital, Noro-Moseley Partners, and TDFunds, which invested $49 million in Virtustream’s Series A round last year. Read more »
Amazon.com is making what appears to be a big investment in analytic database startup ParAccel. ParAccel today announced the close of a Series E round led by Amazon, bringing the company’s total funding to $73 million. The amount of this round is undisclosed. Read more »
There are big cloud server instances, and then there are big cloud server instances. Storm On Demand’s new 96GB, 32-core instance is of the latter variety. In fact, it’s the biggest you’re likely to find anywhere, and it’s designed with maximum I/O performance in mind. Read more »
The size of Hadoop deployments appears to have tripled since October, according to statistics that Cloudera is sharing. If accurate, they help prove assumptions that Hadoop usage grows quickly once organizations wrap their heads around how it is used. Read more »
PaaS pioneer Heroku has added support for the Clojure programming language to its offering. Heroku also supports Ruby and Node.js as development options. Supporting three development options might not appear like a big deal, but it is, especially for enterprise developers who require certain features. Read more »
If I were a cloud-service provider, I’d consider investing in television advertising. If I didn’t know better, TV, and the media, in general, the cloud is a fairly useless and highly insecure place to store my data. Perhaps worse, I might think it’s a joke. Read more »
Big data — as in managing and analyzing large volumes of information — has come a long way in the past couple of years. Among the greatest innovations might be the advent of real-time analytics, which allow the processing of information in real time to enable instantaneous decision-making. Read more »
We’ve all heard stories about cloud-service fees run amok, only spotted when the bill comes due. Cloudability, part of Structure 2011 LaunchPad, wants to keep companies abreast of what they’re spending in the cloud with a free app that shows them what’s being spent and where. Read more »
With its new SplitSecure technology, Structure 2011 LaunchPad finalist BeyondCore is trying to prove that companies processing sensitive data don’t have to be afraid of cloud computing. The company has actually been around since 2003, but SplitSecure represents its first foray into the cloud. Read more »
When done right, cloud computing actually can be a source of significant competitive advantage. So says Zynga, at least, which highlighted its unique cloud infrastructure, as well as its advanced analytics efforts, as part of its core strengths in the S-1 statement it filed this morning. Read more »
Among the biggest problems with developing applications for the cloud is scaling the database layer. GenieDB, a competitor in our recent Structure 2011 LaunchPad competition, wants to give its customers the benefits of both SQL and NoSQL to scale across data centers. Read more »
For anyone concerned about the difficulty of doing advanced analytics tasks with Hadoop, the future might be just around the corner. A stealth-mode Palo Alto, Calif.–based startup called Platfora is working to make Hadoop usable even for the non-data scientists among us. Read more »
If there’s one thing certain about Amazon Web Services, it’s that the company isn’t Oracle. On Thursday, the company slashed the bandwidth charges for its various services, the latest in a series of price cuts dating back to 2008. Read more »
PHP Fog is a cloud computing Platform-as-a-Service with a laser focus on PHP applications. It’s what PHP Fog does in the foggy middle that’s so unique and that garnered it a place in our second-annual LaunchPad competition. Read more »
At last week’s Structure conference, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels used his “State of the Cloud” keynote to highlight how cloud computing is evolving beyond its traditional IaaS, PaaS and SaaS layers. I’m not so sure it’s outdated yet, but it’s getting there. Read more »
The fight for Hadoop dominance is officially on. While Hortonworks is busy answering questions about its product strategy, Cloudera and MapR will demonstrate new versions of their distributions overflowing with bells and whistles. And there are several other competitive products lurking in the background. Read more »
Hadoop is a very valuable tool, but it’s far from perfect. While Apache, Cloudera, EMC, MapR and Yahoo focus on core architectural issues, there is a group of vendors trying to make Hadoop a more-fulfilling experience by focusing on business-level concerns such as applications and utilization. Read more »
Ravel now offers an open-source graph database that looks to bring the benefit’s of Google’s Pregel project to the masses. Graph databases don’t get the attention of other big-data technologies such as Hadoop or NoSQL, but every Twitter user is familiar with what they can do. Read more »
Yahoo will be spinning off a separate company focused on the development and commercialization of Apache Hadoop, called HortonWorks. The official announcement likely will come tomorrow or Wednesday to coincide with Yahoo’s annual Hadoop Summit, but rumors have been circulating for months. Read more »
Paul Froutan, formerly head of global data center infrastructure at Google, is joining cloud-storage pioneer Nirvanix as CTO. The addition will almost certainly improve Nirvanix’s ability to deliver its services, but the larger-scale news is yet another public defection from Google. Read more »
Being able to crunch terabytes of data is great, but having someone else do it for you is even better. HPCC Systems, which launched last week to challenge Hadoop’s big data dominance, is planning to do just that with a cloud service for big data processing. Read more »
Simon Crosby is leaving his post as data center and virtualization CTO at Citrix Systems to launch a new company called Bromium that will utilize virtualization technology to tackle cloud computing security. The company raised $9.2 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Read more »
Cloud storage startup SolidFire is giving cloud providers early access to its solid-state-disk-based systems for storing customers’ data. The Atlanta-based company is building SSD-based appliances that it says will help ease the migration of enterprise applications into the cloud by significantly boosting storage performance. Read more »
IDC today released the results of a report finding that the cloud services market by $72.9 billion by 2015, drive almost entirely by Software as a Service. This suggests — likely accurately — that SaaS is the key to cloud computing ubiquity. Read more »
At Google’s I/O event last month, the company announced new features and a new pricing model for its App Engine PaaS offering, and now the web giant thinks it’s prepared to compete with companies like Red Hat and Salesforce.com in bringing enterprise users to its platform. Read more »
Zynga has been releasing details about its innovative hybrid cloud deployment, called Z Cloud, over the past year, and it has finally revealed the final piece of the puzzle. Namely, that the private cloud component of its infrastructure was built using Cloud.com’s CloudStack software. Read more »
It looks like web hosting giant GoDaddy is getting ready to launch a new cloud computing service called Data Center On Demand that could potentially make a dent in the market share of providers such as Amazon Web Services Read more »
Today the Brookings Institute will host a panel discussion about proposed legislation called the Cloud Computing Act of 2011. I spoke this morning with panelist Dan Reed of Microsoft about his thoughts on the draft legislation, based on what he has seen of it. Read more »
Apple’s iCloud and other consumer-focused cloud efforts represent a golden opportunity for startups to raise venture capital, but it might not be from jumping on the bandwagon. According to NEA’s Peter Sonsini, the key to getting VC investment is selling the infrastructure that underlies popular clouds. Read more »
LexisNexis is releasing a set of open-source, data-processing tools it says outperforms Hadoop and even handles workloads that Hadoop presently cannot. There have been calls for a legitimate alternative to Hadoop, and this certainly looks like one. Read more »
