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 »
Infobright today announced version 4.0 of its analytic database designed for machine-generated data, complete with a handful of innovations that should significantly the speed and accuracy of poring through piles of big data. Read more »
VMware announced the late-summer availability of vFabric 5 this morning, an integrated suite of the various application-platform components it has acquired over the past couple years. The news illustrates pretty definitively that, for the time being, VMware’s on-premise and cloud-based platform strategies are fairly distinct. Read more »
VMware today bought Israeli startup Digital Fuel in an attempt to give VMware customers better insights into how their IT investments measure up. Isreali newspaper Globes said VMware paid $85 million for Digital Fuel. Read more »
Online dating service eHarmony is using SeaMicro’s specialized Intel Atom-powered servers as the foundation of its Hadoop infrastructure, demonstrating that big data applications such as Hadoop might be a killer app for low-powered micro servers. Read more »
Xeround’s cloud-based MySQL service enters general availability today, becoming the first cloud-based third-party MySQL distribution that actually requires customers to pay for the service. If it’s successful, there are plenty of other cloud database startups waiting in the wings to ride the SQL-in-the-cloud wave. Read more »
Is Hadoop our only hope for solving big data challenges? From scalability to fault tolerance, Hadoop does myriad things very well. Yet, Hadoop is not the solution to all big data problems and use cases. Several key issues remain, including investment, complexity and batch-only processing. Read more »
Atlanta-based data-center-efficiency startup JouleX has raised $17 million from Sigma Partners, Flybridge Capital Partners, Intel Capital, Target Partners and TechOperators. As energy prices rise, energy generation facilities are stretched and hyperscale becomes normal, companies like JouleX should find it easy to spread their message. Read more »
Web service creator Seven Scale today opened its Papertrail cloud-based log-management service to the general public. Log files have always been important for troubleshooting, but are seeing increased interest with the advent of big data because companies can draw business-level insights from the data, too. Read more »
Flash-storage component manufacturer Fusion-io is trading well above its initial public offering price, signaling that investors believe solid-state drives might actually live up to their promise to displace large quantities of spinning disks in enterprise data centers. Read more »
When Steve Jobs flashed inside images of Apple’s new cloud data center during his WWDC keynote on Monday, he ignited a mini firestorm of speculation about just kind hardware is filling its immense surface area. Everyone seems to agree that HP and Teradata were big winners. Read more »
IT analytics company Splunk has received a patent for its method of organizing and presenting big data to mirror the experience of browsing links on the web. Splunk wants users to think about big data like a web problem and not like an analytics problem. Read more »
Systems giant HP today announced a slew of new enterprise cloud products and services, but it won’t be until later this summer — when it unveils its public cloud services — that we’ll see just how big a role HP will play in the cloud computing space. Read more »
Cloud-management platform provider RightScale is launching a service to help customers manage private and hybrid clouds similar to what RightScale customer Zynga does with its vaunted Z Cloud infrastructure. Hybrid cloud computing is hot, and MyCloud might represent a better way of thinking about the model. Read more »
It looks as if solid-state cache specialist Fusion-io’s IPO on Thursday has investors thinking big about the possibilities of flash storage in the enterprise. Flash array maker Violin Memory raised a $40 million round from strategic public-market investors, and a software company called VeloBit emerged from stealth. Read more »
Apple officially launched its much-hyped iCloud suite of services at its Worldwide Developer Conference today, and although the capabilities are sure to be the talk of the town, it’s Apple’s cloud infrastructure that makes it all work. Steve Jobs said as much during his WWDC keynote. Read more »
CloudBees, the Java-focused Platform-as-a-Service company, is now offering a paid “Premium” version of its RUN@cloud PaaS offering. CloudBees, it appears, is trying to gain a foothold in the PaaS space while other Java-focused efforts are still getting underway. Read more »
WAN-optimization startup Infineta has raised $15 million for its product that speeds traffic flows between data centers. Unlike many WAN-optimization products that speed traffic between user sites and a data center, Infineta targets data moving between data centers at up to 10 GbE speeds. Read more »
Since the concept of “private cloud” was introduced, there have been efforts by certain people to prove it “wrong” or show that it doesn’t make sense when compared with the public cloud. This seems like a silly crusade — both provide tremendous value. Read more »
Earlier this week, cloud provider GoGrid announced that founder and original CEO John Keagy is leaving that post and transitioning into a new role, a decision Keagy told me this morning is the result of the company growing too fast. Read more »
LawPivot, a Google Ventures-funded legal Q&A startup targeting small companies, is broadening its reach by becoming part of Microsoft’s BizSpark program. As LawPivot continues to grow, it could help lead a movement toward true Knowledge as a Service. Read more »
VirtualWorks, a Boca-Raton, Fla.-based startup from Citrix Systems founder Ed Iacobucci, has raised $8.5 million from Florida’s New World Angels investment group to tackle the problem of corporate data dispersed across servers, devices and clouds. It could also help with data portability between clouds. Read more »
Big data startup MapR is now an official corporate contributor to the Apache Hadoop project, a somewhat interesting turn of affairs given its corporate mission to lure users away from Apache’s Hadoop Distributed File System. However, other companies commercializing Hadoop shoud follow its lead. Read more »
NYSE Technologies is rolling out a cloud platform for financial services firms that lets them provision infrastructure and access the suite NYSE Technologies trading services and market data. The cloud is built using a variety of VMware tools, as well as EMC storage products. Read more »
Facebook today published an interesting visualization of just how complex its codebase is. Actually, the visualization is part of an application within the company, but it gets the point across: Making code changes is no small feat when every module is dependent on so many others. Read more »
The new trend in cloud computing appears to be app-store-like marketplaces where software vendors and infrastructure experts can share their operational know-how. Cloud-computing management platform RightScale became the latest to hop on the trend today with its MultiCloud Marketplace. Read more »
Platform-as-a-Service pioneer Heroku, now part of the Salesforce.com cloud empire, has released a new version that expands programming support beyond its Ruby roots and gives developers more control and insight than previously available. Among the new features is full support for the Node.js framework. Read more »
GoGrid CEO John Keagy wrote on his blog yesterday that when it comes cloud computing, things such as cheap hydroelectric power and massive-scale data centers are overrated. His theory doesn’t make sense for every cloud provider, but he does make some good points. Read more »
The dream of open cloud computing took a couple of small steps forward in the past 24 hours with Apache promoting the Libcloud project to top-level status and with Microsoft releasing a new software development kit for PHP applications on its Windows Azure platform. Read more »
Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup ScaleXtreme’s cloud-based server management service is now available for early access users. We covered the company in February when the final product was still being built, but it has come a long way since then. Read more »
Citrix today announced the first commercial distribution of the open source OpenStack cloud-computing software, which Citrix ix calling Project Olympus. It’s a bold move to announce an OpenStack distribution so early into the project’s existence, but Citrix must to something to combat bitter rival VMware. Read more »
One of the underlying theme’s of this year’s Structure conference is how cloud computing has matured to the point that we’re beyond arguing over whether it’s a good idea and into how to best implement it. This year’s LaunchPad finalists underscore the cloud’s new reality. Read more »
San Jose, Calif.-based storage startup MapR, which provides a high-performance alternative for the Hadoop Distributed File System, will serve as the storage component for EMC’s forthcoming Greenplum HD Enterprise Edition Hadoop distribution. Cloudera announced an HDFS partnership of its own with compression expert RainStor. Read more »
Server monitoring startup ServerDensity will launch an app store for plugins to its popular cloud-based service. Like many SaaS startups, ServerDensity provides a collection of core components, but is hoping to rely on its user community to address the longtail needs of certain customer segments. Read more »
Platform-as-a-Service startup DotCloud is acquiring fellow startup DuoStack in an attempt to gird itself for a fight that’s likely to leave some casualties in the years to come. DotCloud and DuoStack are making a smart move to ensure their mutual survival while combining their innovative capabilities. Read more »
