DataStax, the Burlingame, Calif.-based startup that sells commercial products and services on top of the NoSQL Cassandra database, has appointed database industry veteran Billy Bosworth as its new CEO. Bosworth comes from Quest Software, where he was vice president and general manager of the company’s database […] Read more »
In five short years, cloud computing has gone from being a quaint technology to a major catch phrase. For the first time, we’ve decided to condense our knowledge into The Structure 50, a list of the 50 companies that are influencing the way the cloud/infrastructure evolves. Read more »
Amazon Web Services has upped its enterprise credibility again, this time via a partnership with SAP that has certified certain SAP applications to run in production environments on the AWS cloud. With the designation, AWS joins a select group of enterprise-focused cloud providers. Read more »
Despite a lot of speculation lately about who’s winning the private-cloud race and what companies might be on the way out, it’s far too early to call the game in anyone’s favor. Adoption is picking up, but it’s nowhere near ubiquitous, so there’s plenty of time. Read more »
Software-as-a-Service startup New Relic has added a new, and free, capability to its application-performance management product that lets customers monitor their users’ experiences in real time. The bigger picture is how New Relic continues to show the way to do SaaS in a cloud-computing world. Read more »
According to a post today on the Facebook Engineering blog, the social networking leader undertook an effort called “Project Triforce,” which involved provisioning a replica production region from an existing cluster, to ensure the site could run smoothly across three regions without falling on its face. Read more »
As a recent McKinsey Global Institute report on big data points out, finding the appropriate balance between consumer privacy and business innovation will play a key role in ensuring that big data and the overall web advance at the pace required by both business and consumers. Read more »
VMware has acquired IT management provider Shavlik Technologies in an attempt to simplify for small- and medium-sized business the process of managing their machines. Shavlik brings an interesting set of new capabilities to VMware, including the ability to manage physical machines and a SaaS delivery model. Read more »
EMC is throwing its weight behind Hadoop. Today, at the EMC World, the storage giant announced a slew of Hadoop-centric products, including a specialized appliance for Hadoop-based big data analytics and two separate Hadoop distributions. EMC’s entry is going to shake-up the Hadoop market. Read more »
The recent excitement around Hadoop has culminated in five new Hadoop products today from EMC, NetApp, Mellanox, SnapLogic and DataStax. What’s interesting now is that we’re seeing large technology vendors with hardware expertise pushing gear optimized for Hadoop. Read more »
Don’t feel bad if you haven’t heard of Opera Solutions. However, the analytics-as-a-service provider has been quietly building up its $100 million company since 2004 and, with big data on the tip of the IT world’s collective tongue, Opera is ready to start spreading the word. Read more »
Data-integration specialist Syncsort is releasing two new Hadoop tools that it says will give Hadoop users a better, faster experience than they can achieve using Apache Hadoop alone. Unlike some other recent announcements, however, Syncsort is looking to improve Hadoop rather than replace aspects of it. Read more »
The advent of Web 2.0 and its principles of scaling out and designing to fail have brought about something of a sea change in how companies buy servers. For evidence, one needn’t look any further than Dell, which is making a killing selling micro servers. Read more »
Amazon Web Services and GoGrid both made some significant strides this week toward addressing digital-rights management issues. Neither feature is particularly sexy by cloud computing standards, but both are very necessary for bringing certain user and software-vendor communities into the fold. Read more »
GigaOM Pro, North Bridge Venture Partners and the 451 Group are looking for readers to take a survey on “The Future of Cloud Computing,” the results of which will be presented live at Structure 2011. Respondents will be entered to win a ticket to Structure 2011. Read more »
Red Hat today is launching two new cloud computing offerings, IaaS software called CloudForms and PaaS software called OpenShift. CloudForms helps users configure, deploy and manage virtual resources, and OpenShift is Red Hat’s incarnation of the Makara technology that it bought it November. Read more »
An HP executive “accidentally” spilled the beans of HP’s upcoming cloud computing plans on his LinkedIn page yesterday, but the mere presence of the plans isn’t as important as is the fact that they look pretty solid. Read more »
Managed service provider Internap has announced that it will be offering a public infrastructure-as-a-service cloud built atop the OpenStack platform. The service will be available in the third quarter of this year, and also features the option of running applications on VMware-based virtual infrastructure. Read more »
Rackspace has informed Slicehost customers that it will be shutting down the popular cloud-hosting service. Rackspace bought Slicehost in 2008 to serve as the foundation of its Rackspace Cloud business, but Rackspace now betting its cloud computing future on the OpenStack platform. Read more »
Red Hat is expanding its set of cloud capabilities by announcing the JBoss Enterprise Data Grid. The product gives customers an in-memory data grid that scales along with the server infrastructure and provides a high-performance cache to offload the demand on the primary database. Read more »
Cisco’s cloud computing ambitions might be judged by outsiders as being centered around selling servers and networking gear to cloud data centers, but recent developments show that such an assessment might not be entirely fair as Cisco comes around on open source software. Read more »
NoSQL startup Couchbase is offering a beta version of its Mobile Couchbase for iOS product, which is designed for iPhone app developers who want data synchronization between mobile devices and backend data stores. The product targets data like preferences, contacts, game scores and enterprise application data. Read more »
Amazon Web Services released its official statement and apology regarding the four-day outage that began on April 21, vowing, as expected, to improve the design of its Elastic Block Storage service and generally improve availability across the AWS platform. Read more »
IBM today announced a new product dedicated to helping customers perform sentiment analysis of social media data, as well as a new program with the Yale School of Management’s Center for Customer Insight to train students in advanced data analysis skills. Read more »
If Yahoo plans to spin off its white-hot Hadoop business, it would make Yahoo the third vendor operating alongside Cloudera and IBM — fighting for what, right now, are only speculative customer dollars. Would Yahoo’s spinout have what it takes to compete? Read more »
Yottaa today announced its Yottaa Optimizer service, which promises to improve website performance by leveraging a global network of cloud servers. Yotta claims the service delivers results “with just a few clicks,” which would make it a welcome alternative to CDN technologies. Read more »
As a result of last week’s four-day cloud computing outage, both Amazon Web Services and its users have publicly come under fire for their practices. I think both groups will take these criticisms to heart, but I don’t think we should expect anything too drastic. Read more »
CloudBees is now offering its RUN@cloud service as software that lets users build their own PaaS environments on OpenStack- or VMware vSphere-based infrastructure. Choice in PaaS deployment environments is becoming a new must-have feature, especially in light of Amazon’s recent outage and projects like Cloud Foundry. Read more »
Hadoop is the talk of the town when it comes to big data, but it’s not without faults that have some users begging for an alternative. Like many open source projects, it’s relatively unpolished and often requires a great deal of learning and much strenuous customization […] Read more »
The four-day-long Amazon Web Services outage was no doubt a traumatic experience for many customers, but that didn’t have to be the case. There were plenty of users that were not affected, were minimally affected or that acted in a hurry to resolve the problem. Read more »
Amazon Web Services has put the outage behind them and now are getting back to normal, according to the latest status update from Amazon Web Services on its Service Health Dashboard. Performance data from Cedexis shows what it meant in terms of network latency. Read more »
BigSwitch Networks, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based network virtualization startup founded on the principles of the OpenFlow standard, has raised $13.75 million in a Series A financing, led by Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures. The company’s goal is to become the VMware of networking. Read more »
The popular web sites down today because of the Amazon Web Services outage are getting most of the attention, but they were only a handful among the hundred-plus that were affected, including at least three popular platform-as-a-service providers — Heroku, Engine Yard and DotCloud. Read more »
Battery-powered energy storage provides an on-demand, predictable source of energy to power systems to keep them running optimally, and even to enable new projects, but the cost seems to be scaring some people away despite the high value the technology brings beyond mere stored energy. Read more »
In an afternoon chat today at Green:Net, Google Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl explained that the future of data center efficiency will not come from improved data center designs themselves, but from more-efficient hardware and cleaner sources of energy. Read more »
Amazon Web Services claims to be making significant progress in restoring functionality to a large number of EC2, Elastic Block Storage and Relational Database Service instances that went down due to a “networking event” in the early-morning hours and affected a number of popular web sites. Read more »
Just like every vendor now has a cloud product and every company has a cloud strategy in place, big data efforts also will become ubiquitous over the next couple years, and the two very well might merge in the near future. Read more »
The most interesting part about yesterday’s announcement that Groupon is using the Cloudera Distribution of Hadoop wasn’t the actual use but, rather, the insight that Groupon is “building a world-class infrastructure” of which Hadoop will be a key part. But recruiting big-data-savvy talent is getting rather pricey. Read more »
RightScale and Zend are now offering a platform-as-a-service offering for developing PHP applications in the cloud. RightScale and Zend are targeting their joint RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack for enterprise applications that require advanced development tools and high service levels. Read more »
Nutanix startup that sells an appliance combining computing and storage on the same nodes, has raised $13.2 million. The company is developing an appliance combining computing and storage on the same server nodes, a story that should resonate with customers concerned with scalability and performance. Read more »
