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 »
The Gartner Magic Quadrant has been called out for some serious wrongdoings, but by not including Amazon Web Services among the leaders in its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting, Gartner just flat got it wrong. Read more »
Hadoop startup Cloudera has rounded out its support of the Apache Software Foundation by becoming a Silver-level sponsor. Cloudera already contributes code and personnel to the Apache Hadoop project and Cloudera’s Doug Cutting (and Hadoop creator) is the ASF chairman. Read more »
Heading into the new year, there are a lot of questions, including whether Netflix is a friend of open source and whether Facebook will build more data centers. In some cases, such as Apple move into cloud services, the only question remaining is “when?”. Read more »
Depending on how Facebook intends to evolve, both performance considerations and data privacy laws might make additional infrastructure investment a good idea. Regardless of its rationales, however, the time to do so is now — before the company goes public and must answer for every dollar spent. Read more »
Skytap has closed a $10 million Series C round for its business-friendly IaaS cloud. The funding comes after some interesting IaaS developments late in 2010, and might signal that 2011 will be a big year for IaaS cloud providers targeting traditional businesses. Read more »
From ARM Holdings to Facebook to VMware, and whether via acquisitions, innovation or challenging the status quo, many vendors were able to effect paradigmatic shifts in computing or otherwise leave indelible marks on enterprise IT by what they did in 2010. Read more »
Two very different vendors – Oracle and Red Hat – once again reported very impressive quarterly earnings in the past week. However, as cloud computing starts to take hold over the next few years, Red Hat will see even bigger growth, while Oracle might see revenues plummet. Read more »
Thanks to SaaS, the marketplace for business software in many ways reflects the way consumers have acquired web-based goods and services for years. The expectation is that by making the technology easy to acquire, early customers will use it and influence broader adoption in their organizations. Read more »
I reported earlier this week on Amazon’s new VM Import service, which some have described as a Hotel California for VMware images. Today, I received word from Amazon Web Services that it’s planning to address this issue, to a degree, as the offering evolves. Read more »
Rather than bombard readers with information with the holidays officially upon us, I’m interested to hear your thoughts. Which of the following big data approaches and startups will thrive, which will remain relegated to specific use cases, and which will simply fade into oblivion? Read more »
Red Hat just announced another solid fiscal quarter, continuing a trend of increased operating system and middleware market share that carried on even through the worst of the current recession. According to CEO Jim Whitehurst, customers know that buying Red Hat means “future-proofing” their IT investments. Read more »
Given the myriad technological, political and cultural obstacles, what chance is there that cloud computing or Green IT will be there within the next 12 months, or that something will convince Apple to open up? I’d say “minimal,” but I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Read more »
Everybody’s misguided sometimes, and that includes computer scientists and software vendors. Today brings news that Akamai lost its patent-infringement appeal against Limelight, Microsoft’s absent hybrid cloud strategy might be affecting Hyper-V adoption and everyone might be wrong that having the fastest supercomputer is so important. Read more »
I asked last week why VMware users would migrate to the cloud using Amazon’s VM Import feature instead of choosing a VMware vCloud partner such as BlueLock or Terremark. After seeing what some interested parties have to say, I’m starting to think interoperability isn’t the goal. Read more »
On Friday, Microsoft’s HPC division opened up the company’s Dryad parallel-processing technologies as a Community Technology Preview (CTP). Dryad could be a rousing success, in part because Hadoop — which is written in Java — is not ideally suited to run atop Windows or support .NET applications. Read more »
Today’s links focus on the importance of infrastructure in building reliable services. We have Tumblr investing in a new data center, KT building a cost-efficient cloud and Citrix’s Simon Crosby telling why private clouds could have helped prevent the Wikileaks debacle on all fronts. Read more »
Nasuni has closed a $15 million Series B round, bringing its total to $23 million over two rounds on the promise of its file system virtual appliance that automatically distributes files between the cloud and a local cache. Read more »
In pretty much every discussion about Hadoop, the question arises of who’s using it outside of web companies. But to see what’s really going on with Hadoop, we should continue to look to the web and, increasingly, to Facebook in particular.(GigaOM Pro subscription required) Read more »
There are two sides to every story: cloud computing might be a problem or a solution; the responsibility for online privacy might lie with web sites or the government; the ideal server might be either underpowered or overclocked; and Oracle might or might not ruin Java. Read more »
Anyone who’s walked the exhibition floor of a large IT tradeshow might recognize Splunk for its cleverly emblazoned T-shirts and bumper stickers. But beyond quirky sayings, there’s real value in Splunk’s IT search and monitoring product — so much so that it’s planning an IPO in 2012. Read more »
Today is full of intrigue, at least in terms of relationships among IT vendors. Probably the most intriguing relationships involve Cisco and NetApp, and the foursome that teamed up to purchaseNovell’s intellectual property. Elsewhere, AWS launched VM Import, and open source BI vendors are proliferating. Read more »
It seems like every year since 2008 has been dubbed the “Year of the Cloud,” but I think 2010 was it. There are legitimate trends that allow us to get past mere speculation and actually make informed predictions about what the future holds for cloud computing. Read more »
Rackspace is moving up the cloud stack by acquiring Cloudkick, a startup that provides server management and monitoring as a service. Rackspace already has a partnership with CA-owned Nimsoft, so I suspect the purchase was spurred by a desire to compete with Amazon Web Services. Read more »
There was much talk about cloud computing today, all of it hitting different aspects — from how IT organizations will adopt it to what makes a “niche” cloud to how AT&T’s spotty network helped drive the need for it. Hadoop and Cassandra news also caught my eye. Read more »
Private-cloud pioneer Eucalyptus is furthering its partner-centric growth strategy by partnering with Red Hat. Possibly more important than the announcement, though, is the timing: Eucalyptus is not the only internal-cloud software on the market, and it needs to win back its space in the spotlight. Read more »
There was lots of cloud news today, but the biggest has to be the Sixth Circuit’s holding protecting email under the Fourth Amendment. Data privacy is one the biggest issues facing cloud computing, and this is a good first step — although it’s just that. Read more »
Scalable SQL startup Clustrix has closed a $12 million Series B round of funding, bringing its total to $30 million. The new money came from existing investors U.S. Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital and ATA Ventures. Considering Clustrix’s steady momentum, this funding shouldn’t take anybody by surprise. Read more »
CloudBees, fresh off closing a $4 million funding round, has acquired fellow Java PaaS startup Stax Networks. The move might seem inconsequential — both companies are relatively unknown — but it signals that the PaaS consolidation kicked off by Red Hat and Salesforce.com might just be beginning. Read more »
Web infrastructure is a hot topic today, after Amazon Web Services experienced an outage over the weekend, and after Facebook released some interesting details about its Hadoop cluster on Friday. Even LinkedIn is making headlines by expanding into a new Los Angeles data center. Read more »
CloudSwitch today released version 2.0 of CloudSwitch Enterprise, which should help in the company’s quest to become an integral part of customers’ environments. Our conversation focused on the company’s future plans and how it’s bucking the seeming trend toward grabbing as much venture capital as possible. Read more »
Amazon’s new 5TB object limit in S3 made quite a splash, as has EC2 in Ireland, where it now accounts for one-third of all web-facing servers. While AWS is attracting new users, others, like Cisco with cloud developers and Datameer with data analysts — are trying. Read more »
Amazon Web Services has upped the maximum image size in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to 5TB from 5GB. Clearly, a 1,000X increase is significant and probably is driven by the new class of customers AWS is catering to with its Cluster Compute and GPU Instances. Read more »
Heated rivalries keep everything interesting, so it’s good to see that “Do No Evil” Google is up to the task of trading blows with Microsoft in the cloud collaboration space. Today, it took offense to being omitted from bidding in the USDA contract that Microsoft won, […] Read more »
Amazon Web Services jumped on the mobile-application development bandwagon today with software development kits for both the Google Android and Apple iOS operating systems. The move underscores the need for cloud providers – even the mighty AWS – to target the increasingly important mobile-developer market. Read more »
Compellent announced today that it is in talks with Dell about a possible acquisition. Compellent would be a nice score for Dell. After failing to close the deal with 3PAR over the summer, Dell still needs a big acquisition to bolster its storage lineup. Read more »
Believe it or not, there was cloud activity today outside of Salesforce.com buying Heroku. What struck me was Oracle defining Java victory on its own terms, Microsoft announcing the forthcoming SQL Azure Reporting, SAP’s mission to change BI and open source expert Matt Asay leaving Canonical. Read more »
Marc Benioff’s insistence on calling Salesforce.com a cloud computing company used to draw a few laughs. That’s been changing over the past several months with offerings like VMforce and Database.com, and its acquisition of PaaS pioneer Heroku for $212 million is the icing on the cake. Read more »
There’s a lot to talk about today if you’re a cloud developer. Aside from Database.com, we have Amazon Web Services achieving PCI compliance, a rundown of developer-centric cloud strategies, an argument that services trumps APIs and a question on whether PaaS providers should publicize their shortcomings. Read more »
