Southern California Edison has installed a 100TB Teradata data warehouse setup to store and serve data from customers’ smart grid meters. It’s not the last such deal we’ll see, as the market for smart-grid data analytics is predicted to reach $4.2 billion by 2015. Read more »
After hemorrhaging cash for the better part of a decade and filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy twice in three years, it looks like storied server and supercomputer maker SGI might actually turn a profit again. It’s plan involves everything from diversification to, unfortunately, cutting personnel costs. Read more »
Cloud-design guru Randy Bias has stepped down as CEO of the company he co-founded, Cloudscaling, but will remain on as CTO. Bias wrote on this blog today that Michael Grant is coming on board as CEO so that Bias can focus on technical innovation, his forte. Read more »
Juniper Networks unveiled a new data center architecture that will flatten out the network layer to improve performance, scale and manageability. Called QFabric, the new product line will help customers to create a fabric of servers, storage and networking from their data center resources. Read more »
Add Microsoft to the list of cloud providers offering free usage levels for their cloud offerings, as the company is now offering 750 free hours of Windows Azure usage. Like most things free, though, there is a catch. Read more »
Shortly after its second-quarter earnings statement revealed a rapidly growing server business, Cisco this revealed Tuesday morning its server-customer count was nearing 4,000 as of Jan. 29. That’s an impressive number considering that Cisco’s Unified Computing System server business has only been shipping since September 2009. Read more »
Cloud computing represents a fundamental technical and business trend, but there are barriers in cloud computing that limit broad cloud-based deployment of scaled enterprise-class services. Hybrid clouds will overcome some of these barriers, but the future requires improvements in cloud architectures and virtualization technologies. Read more »
Switzerland-based cloud provider CloudSigma opened a U.S. office this week, the first step in what could be a successful attempt to bring its unique brand of cloud computing to the United States. CloudSigma’s “freedom through technology” approach stands out in its resemblance to traditional colocation services. Read more »
As Amazon Web Services continues to roll out new features and services for its cloud platform, its competitors increasingly tout better performance as a key point of differentiation, which has me wondering if either approach — more features or better performance — will clearly win out. Read more »
Aaccording to one machine-learning expert, one key takeaway from Watson’s “Jeopardy!” victory is simple: humans are very smart. That a system such as Watson can understand natural language is a huge step forward, but it’s still only as good as its data and algorithms. Read more »
Two popular big data startups, Karmasphere and 10gen, made management changes this week, which might signal that the companies’ boards feel they’re poised to make runs at the big time and need seasoned leadership to take them to the next level. Read more »
What do Bon Jovi and the world’s fastest supercomputer have in common? Presently, they both rely on GPUs. Bon Jovi has partnered with Animoto on a fan-video contest for each its current tour, a possibility made possible by Animoto’s transition to Amazon Cluster GPU Instances. Read more »
After a $15.7 billion fourth quarter that put Dell over the $60 billion revenue mark for the year, Michael Dell got to talking once again about his company’s acquisition strategy, suggesting that more software purchases are indeed on the way. Read more »
CacheIQ announced earlier this week that it has raised $6 million for its network file system caching product that offloads data to either DRAM or flash memory. Assuming it can gain a toehold against some established competition, CacheIQ chose a wise market to enter. Read more »
Terracotta is trying to bring real-time analytics to the masses (of Java users, at least) by letting Ehcache users query data stored in the product’s in-memory cache. With Ehcache Search, customers can perform real-time queries against terabytes of data stored in their transactional caches. Read more »
New Relic Founder and CEO Lew Cirne has done and seen a lot in his IT lifetime — from cutting his teeth at Apple to creating Wily — and every bit of it influences how he approaches New Relic, both as a technology and a company. Read more »
In a new Forrester report, authors James Staten and Lauren E. Nelson advise infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders to encourage their data analysts to get hip to cloud-based analytics tools and to consider making their organizational data available to the public as a cloud resource. Read more »
Enomaly’s SpotCloud cloud-computing brokerage is now available for public beta, and Enomaly Founder and CTO Reuven Cohen thinks it can be for cloud computing what Google AdSense is for web sites. In fact, he says AdSense was the inspiration for SpotCloud. Read more »
HP announced this morning that it has signed an agreement to acquire analytical database provider Vertica for an undisclosed amount, a decision that finally puts HP into the data warehouse market and analytics space that is becoming more important by the day. Read more »
During a phone call this morning, Rackspace Cloud President Lew Moorman flatly dismissed allegations that his company bought Anso Labs to gain extra power within the OpenStack community, and acknowledged that Rackspace is in talks with Microsoft about providing a managed version of Windows Azure. Read more »
Next week, Jeopardy! champions will square off against IBM’s Watson supercomputer in a contest that could alter way humans view their place in the world. Developing the complex algorithms necessary to carry out such determinations wasn’t easy, and IBM didn’t operate alone. Read more »
Rackspace reported cloud revenues of $31.4 million during the quarter, up approximately 17.1 percent over the previous quarter, and bringing the company’s total 2010 cloud revenue to $100.7 million. Perhaps more telling, though, is the increasing percentage of overall revenue attributed to cloud computing. Read more »
Cisco’s second-quarter earnings have investors worried, but Cisco might be able to hang some of its hopes on servers. While high-end switches are losing ground, Cisco’s server revenue grew 700 percent year over year and now has an annual run rate of $650 million. Read more »
Is it possible that the ever-increasing demand for data center space could be the cure for vacant commercial real estate plaguing cities? In some areas, data center operators are buying up vacant real estate to house new operations and helping revitalize those areas as a result. Read more »
Lost in the wake of Membase and CouchOne merging to form Couchbase, and far away from Silicon Valley, Boston-based NoSQL startup Basho has raised $7.5 million for its efforts to commercialize the Riak NoSQL database, according to a report in Mass High Tech. Read more »
VMware’s announced that the first three vCloud Datacenter partners are now online and that a new tool for managing hybrid VMware clouds is available. These types of capabilities will bring enterprise users into the cloud fold, perhaps leading to even cloudier ambitions in the future. Read more »
A new video from government IT network MeriTalk and IBM illustrates how it takes a special kind of vendor to corral cloud servers and make them suitable for cloud computing at the federal level. Apparently, it takes a “cloudboy” to wrangle servers and FISMA regulations. Read more »
NoSQL database startups Membase and CouchOne have merged to create Couchbase, a company that will combine Membase’s memcached-based Membase Server and CouchOne’s CouchDB-based products into a family of NoSQL products. Other NoSQL vendors need to broaden their scope if they want to compete against Couchbase. Read more »
Hopes were high leading into Saturday’s Comic-Con ticket-sale launch that TicketLeap’s cloud-based ticketing platform would be an availability superhero after two failed attempts in November, but those hopes were dashed nearly immediately. The problem was a MySQL bug, and the solution was scaling down cloud servers. Read more »
Ignition Partners has a reputation for investing in promising cloud computing startups, and that tradition should carry on with the addition of Frank Artale as managing director. Notable recent successes for Ignition include Heroku and Splunk, while Artale has been involved with Cloudera and Membase. Read more »
Flash-memory appliance maker Violin Memory has closed $35 million in new funding, further proof that improving the speed of data access is becoming a driving force in enterprise data centers and that flash will be a foundational piece to solving those performance problems. Read more »
It was a big week for big data, with two key trends adding fuel to claims that data management and analysis will never be the same. Even laggards will be tempted to give big data tools a try to see what all the hype is about. Read more »
After two massive server crashes in November wrecked online ticket-sale launches and infuriated hopeful badgeholders, Comic-Con International has moved its ticketing engine to Amazon Web Serviced-based startup TicketLeap in anticipation of its third attempt — tomorrow morning — to sell badges for this summer’s event. Read more »
With more huge files and data sets making their way across the Internet every day, Aspera’s work of speeding the transfer of that data is never done. And although the company still focuses primarily on the enterprise, consumer content might be on the horizon. Read more »
Few would argue that Hadoop doesn’t have a bright future as a foundational element of big data stacks, but Piccolo, a new project out of New York University, is moving data in-memory in an attempt to improve parallel-processing performance beyond what Hadoop and/or MapReduce can do. Read more »
The Rackspace- and NASA-led OpenStack project released the code for its “Bexar” release this morning, which brings a slew of new features, as well as proofs of concept from large enterprises and major new contributors, such as Cisco. With Bexar, OpenStack is ready for production environments. Read more »
Its first product won’t even be available until this spring, but Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup ScaleXtreme already has big plans: to become, as CEO and Co-founder Nand Mulchandani puts it, “the Salesforce.com of the systems management market” by taking the complexity out of systems management. Read more »
The cloud-storage funding train rolled on this morning with Atlanta-based startup SolidFire raising $11 million. It should be money well spent by the investors, as SolidFire plays at the intersection of two red-hot trends: primary cloud storage and SSDs. Read more »
If the tale of Schooner Information Technology is any indication, the answer to the titular question is “no.” Today, Schooner, which just under two years ago launched its its high-powered, flash-based database appliance made a hard left turn to selling software only. Read more »
Yahoo is ceasing development of its Yahoo Distribution of Hadoop and will be folding it back into the Apache Hadoop project. The company cites a goal “to make Apache Hadoop THE open source platform for big data” as a driving force behind its new strategy. Read more »
