Apple officially stopped producing and selling its Xserve servers today, but that doesn’t mean the consumer-centric company is done in the data center. Mac OS X as a guest operating system atop VMware is an intriguing notion should Apple decide to pursue it. Read more »
Just a month after hurriedly closing a deal to acquire competitor Stax Networks, CloudBees’ RUN@cloud Java platform as a service is available for public use. CloudBees deserves credit for making its offering available while others are still in development. Read more »
Verizon announcing plans to buy Terremark for $1.4 billion is a big deal, but I don’t think Terremark will be the biggest winner as a result. Rather, I think Rackspace looks great as the company straddling the line between the MSP and cloud worlds. Read more »
2010 has been dubbed the “Year of the Cloud” — and from an adoption perspective, this assertion holds true. But when it comes to realizing the benefits of cloud computing and truly running “IT as a business,” things are just beginning to heat up. Read more »
Michael Dell is talking this week talking about having acquisition plans in “software, data centers, cloud computing, storage and virtualization,” which raises questions about who it might be eying up. There are five vendors, in particular, that could give high value for a relatively low price. Read more »
BI vendor Jaspersoft has expanded its software’s support to include pretty much the entire gamut of big data tools available. There might not be much business demand for all these connectors right now, but it’s wise for Jaspersoft to establish its presence in this area early. Read more »
It’s a cloud grab bag, with everything from Amazon Web Services’ new Simple Email Service to debate over cloud APIs to VMware warning that profit margins will stay about the same through 2011. The unifying theme is the steady maturation of cloud technologies and pricing models. Read more »
Mobile-app-analytics startup Flurry is upgrading its data center network with Arista Networks 10 GigE switches, a move designed to improve network performance as Flurry continues to add both terabytes and nodes to its big data system. Is the network the hardware superstar in big data environments? Read more »
San Jose startup Cirtas Systems has a new CEO and raised an additional $22.5 million to advance its vision of helping enterprise customers store primary data in the cloud. Cirtas is riding a hot trend of shuttling storage between on-premise appliances and backend storage clouds. Read more »
Two trends dominate today’s links – Java and stock prices. Some big names in trading have data center operators and Salesforce.com set for falling share prices, and in the world of Java it’s a neat inforgraphic and more claims of Google lifting code for Android. Read more »
Myspace’s gradual decline and a recent blog post have me wondering what the flip side is of rapid scaling. I wonder what social-media sites do with their expansive infrastructures once they no longer need them to meet high demand. They can’t just scale them back, right? Read more »
Amazon Web Services needed to develop its own flavor of PaaS, the cleverly named Elastic Beanstalk, to keep up with cloud development trends, but that doesn’t mean the rest of its IaaS brethren need to follow suit – at least not in the immediate future. Read more »
It’s an interesting collection of links today, most of which are focused on money — specifically, Google’s sky-high Q4 infrastructure spending and AMD’s continually dismal performance. There’s also a great analysis of the PaaS market post-Elastic Beanstalk and a look at Heroku’s recent security hole. Read more »
If today’s links are any indication, we could see some serious changes to once-lauded IT practices and trends. There’s a call for PaaS evolution, talk that Cisco really does fear Xsigo and even stats showing Rackspace nipping at Amazon’s heels in web hosting. Read more »
The growing Java PaaS market will soon need to make room for CumuLogic, an startup led by a team of Sun Microsystems veterans. The Sun connection is notable because Sun was the Java owner and development leader before its acquisition by Oracle early last year. Read more »
Silicon Valley startup Law Pivot is introducing a new recommendation feature for its Quora-like Q&A services that aims to democratize access to quality legal advice. Even before today’s news, though, Law Pivot has defied the odds by gaining traction in a notoriously technology-resistant profession. Read more »
Today’s links offer further proof that technologies like Hadoop and NoSQL aren’t going anywhere — and might even be expanding — and that choosing the right cloud computing solution really should be about what’s best for the individual business (e.g., public vs. private, or available vs. reliable). Read more »
Cloud provider GoGrid has expanded its Infrastructure-as-a-Service catalog by launching a Hosted Private Cloud that maintains all the features multitenant clouds, but on dedicated physical servers. It’s an interesting tactic, and it highlights the different value propositions and visions of the leading cloud providers. Read more »
Some might call this past quarter in infrastructure transformative. The rise of ARM-based processing suggests the days of x86 dominance are numbered, while the Amazon Web Services-WikiLeaks controversy cast light on cloud computing’s legal aspects, and big data got bigger as the Hadoop ecosystem expanded. Read more »
The first non-Rackspace OpenStack-based cloud-storage service is in beta, but it’s just the first in what should be many products based on the open source cloud project. Internap’s XIPCloud Storage platform provides a self-service, web-based offering to complement the hosting providers existing dedicated storage offerings. Read more »
Database startup Clustrix revealed the identities of four customers today, strong evidence that there’s something to its webscale SQL database beyond the $30 million investment that Clustrix has raised thus far. The customers announced are AOL, Photobox, Box.net and iOffer. Read more »
New cloud provider NephoScale announced its presence among IaaS providers earlier this week, touting itself as “an advanced cloud service for serious programmers.” However, I’m afraid its message might fall upon deaf ears, as there’s little evidence the world is clamoring for another IaaS cloud. Read more »
Intel’s fourth-quarter earnings make up for the dearth of news elsewhere. There are so many questions about Intel’s future that one has to wonder if this might be the last record-setting quarter. The other links point to worthwhile analysis on Hadoop, Cloudant and cloud security. Read more »
Google blogged this morning about a new no-planned-downtime for Google Apps, a promise it’s able to make because of its globally distributed infrastructure estimated at more than 1 million servers. Google’s expansive infrastructure gives it multiple options for migrating workloads during planned downtime. Read more »
Here are a couple of “what-ifs” to chew on: What if a supercomputer beats two super humans at Jeopardy ? What if Steve Ballmer is the next executive to leave Microsoft? We’ll know the answer to at least one of those questions in February. Read more »
Private businesses in London are bracing for power shortages during the 2012 Olympics, and it appears data centers located within the city won’t be spared, a turn of events that could have U.K. businesses turning to cloud computing. Read more »
Online data privacy has been in the spotlight for a variety of reasons over the past year, but before Congress, regulators or courts can give any legal clarity to the issue, they need to answer some fundamental questions about area of law even applies. Read more »
Rackspace and Akamai have entered into a relationship through which Rackspace will resell a wide range of Akamai’s CDN services across Rackspace’s business lines. The partnership appears to be another indicator that Rackspace is doing everything it can to put pressure on Amazon Web Services. Read more »
Today’s links pose some good questions about both cloud computing and NoSQL. For cloud computing, the question is about what’s the right blend of old-school and new-school, and for NoSQL it’s whether the next year will bring consolidation, proliferation or both. Read more »
PHP Fog has raised $1.8 million for its PaaS cloud targeting PHP developers. Just as Heroku attracted large numbers of Ruby developers, a PHP PaaS offering certainly should attract users, even if PHP Fog isn’t the only one at that dance. Read more »
The big items today were the resignations at Microsoft and AMD, but there are a couple other important goings on, like Oracle getting sued for essentially the same behavior that accused SAP of committing, and Switch Communications planning a huge expansion for its SuperNAP data center. Read more »
Bob Muglia is leaving Microsoft. More accurately, he’s “retiring” this summer because CEO Steve Ballmer decided that the Server and Tools Business, which Muglia leads, needs new leadership. One has to ask what’s going on at Microsoft and what Steve Ballmer has in mind. Read more »
There’s long been talk of Nvidia joining the server CPU business, but most believed it would go the x86 route. Instead, it chose ARM. Since ARM’s dominance in mobile devices means it is the processor of the future, other companies need a game plan, and fast. Read more »
MeghaWare, when it officially launches in the spring, will give users a single portal to view and manage the entirety of their web identities — from Google Apps to Netflix to, interestingly, Amazon S3. It’s a strange combination of services, until you consider the business model. Read more »
Amazon Web Services has made available two additional support options for customers of its cloud computing services. Customers can now choose from the Bronze level, which costs $49 a month, or the Platinum level, which costs at least $15,000 a month. Read more »
I really do hate CES. Not because I dislike gadgets or the saturation of CES stories in the media, but because I live in Las Vegas. Try getting a table at a restaurant in any Strip property anywhere. Or, better yet, don’t — you won’t succeed. Read more »
Despite the fact that it’s still a mystery how big the cloud computing business really is, it’s already having huge effects on the IT world, including shortening the timeline from idea to product, maximizing profit per server and changing CIOs’ jobs. Read more »
In the case of the following companies (and one open-source project) — ranging from Cisco to Twitter — I think that although they made lots of headlines in the past year, the true effects of their actions won’t be realized until later this year. Read more »
Gluster today announced streaming music pioneer Pandora as a customer, which is telling in a couple ways. It helps validate the billions that large vendors and investors have poured into scale-out storage providers, and it suggests a possible target market for these providers going forward. Read more »
Among the most interesting cloud discussions around the web today were those about what we learned about cloud computing in 2010, how Net Neutrality will affect the delivery of cloud services and what cloud providers presently offer the most-complete portfolios. Read more »
