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 »
Startup Power Assure has new software to align data center cooling and servers power use — along with a new metric for measuring server energy needs that could become a new standard for the industry. Underwriters Laboratories is on board with the metric as are industry players. 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 »
As Cisco revealed its somewhat opaque plans to restructure itself, two things became clear: Marthin De Beer will take on a new role and the company is continuing to bet big on its nebulous Medianet strategy. 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 »
Join us at Structure 2011 June 22-23 in San Francisco, where we’ll be looking at the next wave of cloud technology and services. Anyone with a vested interest in cloud computing will want this chance to hear about its future from the people making it happen. Read more »
The cloud is a wonderful thing, allowing us to backup files to remote servers for just pennies a month. But what happens when something goes awry and your backups start sucking up huge amounts of bandwidth? It’s not pretty, especially when you have a usage cap. 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 »
Facebook, Google, and Yahoo have recently been innovating around building greener data centers, but not all these energy efficiency projects have to be so novel. This morning Verizon announced it’s been cutting the energy consumption of its data centers by installing containment panels made by Polargy. Read more »
Intel has managed to keep pushing Moore’s Law by developing a 3-D transistor that allows the chipmaker to deliver ever smaller chips that will be more powerful, yet consume less energy. The new chip moves Intel ahead of the industry and positions it competitively against ARM. 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 »
Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook’s vice president of Technical Operations, has been the Palo Alto-based web giant’s public face when it comes to all things infrastructure. And today he announced that he would leave the company at the end of the summer. 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 »
A day after Twitter experienced its “CNN moment,” John Adams , the messaging service’s operations engineer, posted a nice slide show on how the company has scaled and the tools it uses. Entitled, “Talk Cloudy to Me” the slide show reviews old insights and offers new ones. 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 »
There are half as many venture firms in existence today as there were in 2000 and venture capital fundraising has taken a nose dive from its pre-recession levels. But venture capital veteran William Quigely says it;s all good news for VCs and startups alike. Read more »
The brains inside your smartphone are getting more power with the latest version of application processors having two processing cores to help speed up the delivery of web site load times and mobile gameplay. That’s awesome, but startup Adapteva, wants to take that number higher. 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 »
Kaminario, which provides high-performance storage, has raised a $15 million C round of financing. As SSD startups hit maturity and the market for using solid state drives in data centers for high-performance and energy efficient storage heats up, when will we see the inevitable consolidation? Read more »
Facebook’s unveiling of its energy-efficient data center in Oregon is being widely hailed as ground-breaking. But to me, Facebook’s touting of one specific efficiency metric shows just how a single snapshot of an energy-efficient data center can sometimes be misleading. Read more »
Opinion on Amazon Web Services recent outage remains somewhat divided: One side blames Amazon for its technical failings; the other holds the cloud giant’s customers responsible for their bad judgment. But the answer to where the primary responsibility lies is a little less black and white. Read more »
The current public cloud computing providers have done an excellent job in bringing innovation and cloud computing technology to the masses. Cloud computing, however, is not yet a fully evolved technology and may take another decade to grow up and deliver on its full potential. Read more »
With all the bad news about recent outages of Amazon Web Services and Sony’s Playstation Network, cloud-based services and the cloud industry needs to more proactively educate users to protect the “cloud” brand. Read more »
AT&T is looking to build a private cloud using the open source cloud platform known as the Open Stack. Josh Kleinpeter, a software engineer with AT&T Interactive mentioned AT&T’s plans during a panel discussion at the Open Stack Summit. 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 »
Two research groups in the last few weeks have shown off 100 terabit per second speeds delivered over fiber connections. The advancement in speeds is both unexpected and necessary as we rely on broadband as the interconnect for our increasingly digital lives. Read more »
New York City’s new Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne said New York City is trying to turn the city’s government into a platform that enables developers and individuals to take data about life in the metropolis and use it to create apps, services and other resources. 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 »
Spiceworks has raised a $25 million fourth round of funding from Adams Capital and Tenaya Capital to continue building out a community of IT professionals that use the Spiceworks software to monitor their companies’ networks. That community is like a Facebook for IT. 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 »
Hot on the heels of its Qwest acquisition, CenturyLink plans to buy Savvis, the data center provider. The $3.2 billion deal mirrors the $1.4 billion Terremark buy that Verizon completed earlier this month as telecommunications providers buy their way into providing cloud and managed hosting services. Read more »
VMware said Tuesday it purchased SlideRocket, an online presentation provider, for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition fits in with VMware’s acquisition of the Zimbra messaging platform in January 2010 and pits VMware against Microsoft, Cisco, Google and other folks in the collaboration space. 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 »
