It looks like Zynga’s infrastructure strategy is rubbing off on gaming startups. Digital Chocolate, purveyor of social games such as Millionaire City and Pro MMA Fighter, is following in Zynga’s footsteps of launching games in the cloud, then bringing them back in house when demand levels. Read more »
Cloud-computing insurance has long been posed as a solution to the problem of cloud users assuming too much risk of failure in the wake of things such as lengthy outages, data breaches and Lulzsec attacks. But it seems the idea of off-loading some of that risk ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Attention webscale aficionados, Twitter plans to open source its Hadoop-like real-time data processing tool known as Storm. The social service nabbed the code through its acquisition last month of BackType, and says it’s a better tool for processing streams of data. Read more »
The great things about open source software stacks is that they’re free and they work. The not-so-great thing is that — like many open source projects — they can be difficult to configure and manage. Luckily, hardware vendors are stepping in to fill the void. Read more »
GigaOM Pro and CenturyLink present “The Continuous Cloud: Achieving Maximum Cloud Uptime,” a free analyst roundtable webinar on Wednesday, August 10 at 10 a.m. PDT. Read more »
Amazon Web Services announced a trio of features designed to lure in enterprise users, including dedicated 1- or 10-Gigabit links to its cloud data centers. AWS is doing everything it can to make its services as flexible, reliable and secure as possible for enterprise users. Read more »
VMware has addressed customer concerns over its new vSphere 5 platform by overhauling the pricing model. When VMware launched its vSphere 5 platform last month, most of the talk was about the new features, but a few customers raised concerns over higher prices. Read more »
The face of high-performance computing is changing. That means new technologies and new names, but also familiar names in new places. Anyone that doesn’t have a cloud computing story to tell, possibly a big data one too, might starting looking really old really quickly. Read more »
quanp, an online file storage service from Japanese electronics giant Ricoh that we’ve covered previously, is being shut down in the U.S. In an email sent to customers, the company notes that the service, which was in beta, will be discontinued on September 30th. Read more »
The open-source, data-processing tool Hadoop is already popular for a variety of use cases that can benefit from clusters of machines churning through unstructured data — such as search engines and social-media analysis — and now it’s turning its attention to security data. Read more »
Data centers might not be the energy hogs anticipated in 2010, but they’re still offering a growing market for both energy efficiency technology and clean power. Read more »
Appistry, a St. Louis–based software company, has closed a $12 million Series D round for its family of distributed computing products. The company also appears to have changed its corporate messaging — from that of a cloud-computing vendor to that of a big-data vendor. Read more »
Nimbus Data Systems today rolled out its second-generation platform and announced online auction giant eBay as a major customer. In fact, eBay has deployed a non-trivial 100TB of Nimbus gear. Have we finally reached the inflection point for primary flash storage? Read more »
Cloud computing startup CumuLogic is making its Platform-as-a-Service software available for beta users that want to deploy it on their own infrastructure. Until now, CumuLogic’s Jave-only PaaS software had only been available for beta users running it atop the Amazon Web Services cloud. Read more »
There has been a lot of talk about consolidation lately because federal agencies have until Oct. 7 to present their plans for slashing data center footprints by 38 percent by 2015. But how exactly the government will pull this off is still up for debate. Read more »
A report from data center energy expert Jonathan Koomey, published on Monday morning, gave a rare glimpse into some educated estimates for how many servers and how much electricity Google uses, and how energy-efficient those custom servers are. Read more »
The economic impact of AWS is much bigger and wider than most think, as it is crucial to the startup revolution. In order to push that philosophy, Amazon holds an annual contest, the AWS Startup Challenge, which is now back for its fifth year. Read more »
Thanks to the recession and energy efficiency technology, data centers consumed less electricity than expected between 2005 and 2010, according to a report by researcher Jonathan Koomey. Read more »
Legacy agent desktop systems were never designed for the dynamics and cost efficiencies demanded of your business today. Download this new paper to learn the business drivers and benefits of migrating to the agile, customer-centric, social media-enabled, and highly efficient next generation agent desktop. Read more »
An interesting example of the practice of open innovation is the SAP Co-Innovation Lab, as SAP and its partners have found a way to integrate hardware and software innovation in a way that is open, but also protective of intellectual property. Read more »
Couchbase has big plans to take NoSQL mainstream. It unveiled two today: Couchbase 2.0, which combines the Membase Server key-value store with the CouchDB document database in a single product, and UnQL, an open query language designed to bring uniformity to the diverse NoSQL landscape. Read more »
Already incredibly useful for helping us get directions, find the nearest grocery store and find out our state capitol, Google Maps is now becoming the hot way to display enterprise or organizational data that’s tagged with location data. The timing of this trend isn’t surprising. Read more »
Big data has the potential to cut operating costs by nearly 50% across all sectors of manufacturing. Get Satisfaction makes several interesting claims about opportunities for big data in an infographic released this month. Market segments such as manufacturing are generating far more data (966 petabytes […] Read more »
Silicon Valley’s fuel cell maker Bloom Energy continues to add customers looking to power part of their data center operations with distributed, cleaner power in California. NTT America plans to install five Bloom fuel cells at one of its data center facilities in San Jose, Calif. Read more »
For anyone who didn’t know, Facebook is a huge Hadoop user, and it does some very cool things to stretch the open source big data platform to meet Facebook’s unique needs. Today, it detailed how it migrated its 30-petabyte cluster from one data center to another. Read more »
HP has joined OpenStack, the open-source cloud software project led by Rackspace. HP joins fellow IT heavyweights Dell, Cisco, Intel and Citrix as OpenStack contributors, which should help ensure that OpenStack is supported by a wide variety of enterprise hardware and software products. Read more »
Former NASA CTO Chris Kemp left his post in the spring to pursue a startup venture, and on Wednesday morning he introduced his new company, Nebula. It’s selling an OpenStack-based appliance for managing scale-out cloud deployments, and is backed by premier talent and investors. Read more »
Concurrent, the company providing the Cascading data workflow API, has raised a $900,000 seed round to capitalize on the newfound excitement around Hadoop. Cascading is an open-source API for creating and running data workflows atop Hadoop clusters. Read more »
When the federal government finally does undertake the task of legislating cloud computing, it seems very likely that security measures and data privacy will dominate. The TechAmerica Foundation’s CLOUD2 commission announced Tuesday a data- and security-heavy set of recommendations that mirror proposed legislation targeting the cloud. Read more »
Nodeable, a San Francisco–based startup that uses social-media tactics to provide analytics on cloud-computing infrastructure, has closed a $2 million Series A round from True Ventures. Essentially, Nodeable feeds customers data about the performance of their cloud resources via a Twitter-like stream. Read more »
On Tuesday Dell announced a reference architecture, open-source software and services offering designed to make deploying an OpenStack-based cloud as easy as following directions. Called the Dell OpenStack Cloud solution, the collection of tools shows that OpenStack will be a driving force in the private-cloud space. Read more »
Here are three lessons to take away from the $10.5 million funding round for Java-centric Platform-as-a-Service startup CloudBees: Be specialized, inclusive, and first. Read more »
Facebook engineers have tested a 64-core chip from Tilera and found it ideal for grabbing data quickly from key value stores. This may galvanize the creation of new benchmarks as the debate of which architecture works best for webscale and cloud computing rages. Read more »
There have been a few recent analyses showing that cloud computing has significant efficiency and cost advantages. I can think of four reasons why cloud computing is (with few exceptions) significantly more energy efficient than using in-house data centers: Read more »
OpenFlow may be one of the hotter buzzwords these days, but getting past the exuberance and down to brass tacks can be difficult because the technology can be applied many places. It also sprouts up in new contexts as the ecosystem around the technology expands. Read more »
Gojee, a recipe search site that knows what I have in my pantry and uses that knowledge to deliver fresh ideas for dinner, has reached 50,000 users. But it may be most useful as a lesson on bringing big data to applications and the masses. Read more »
All the speculation about how Yahoo’s Hadoop spinoff company, Hortonworks, will affect Cloudera and other companies providing Hadoop-based products might have been overblown. The company is still figuring out its strategy around offering a Hadoop distribution, which could be good news for competitors such as Cloudera. Read more »
Two weeks ago, a post quoting Michael Stonebraker, who questioned the relevance of MySQL and Facebook’s use of it, sparked an overwhelmingly negative response. The true state of the database market appears to be that while SQL has its place, ideal uses are fading fast. Read more »
[OpenStack] looks not only like an open-source alternative to Amazon Web Services and VMware vCloud in the public Infrastructure as a Service space, but also a democratizing force in the private-cloud software space. As my colleague Derrick Harris suggests, the open-source cloud-computing project OpenStack has come a […] Read more »
It’s been clear for years now that cloud storage technology is hot — even Amazon, Google and Apple have made big moves into the area. But judging by the latest funding news out of storage startup CX, heavyweight investors are still bullish about newcomers to the space. Read more »
