Uploading video to the web can be a painfully long process even with a high-speed connection. I spoke with Shane Russell of Microsoft’s VidLab, who shared with me how his team delivers content to the Zune Marketplace and the Xbox LIVE service while slashing network latency. Read more »
Yesterday, Cisco and NetApp announced more than 150 customers have adopted their joint FlexPod converged infrastructure architecture, a sign that might point to a falling out between Cisco and its VCE partners, EMC and VMware. Rumor has it Cisco isn’t happy with that arrangement. Read more »
In five short years, cloud computing has gone from being a quaint technology to a major catchphrase. Amazon and others are now moving at Internet speed, trying to offer better security, faster networking, more compliance and a host of other products that are attempting to meet the demands of startups, consumers and enterprises alike. On GigaOM’s Structure channel, we cover the gear and software that comprises the cloud, the services and the people who are changing the industry. Now for the first time, we’ve decided to condense that knowledge into the Structure 50, a list of the 50 companies that are influencing how the cloud and infrastructure evolves. All of these players, big or small, have people, technology or strategies that will help shape the way the cloud market is developing and where it will eventually end up. Companies mentioned in this report include Amazon, Rackspace, Cloudera, China Telecom and SeaMicro. For a full list of companies, and to see the Structure 50 as one full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
DataStax, the Burlingame, Calif.-based startup that sells commercial products and services on top of the NoSQL Cassandra database, has appointed database industry veteran Billy Bosworth as its new CEO. Bosworth comes from Quest Software, where he was vice president and general manager of the company’s database […] Read more »
In five short years, cloud computing has gone from being a quaint technology to a major catch phrase. For the first time, we’ve decided to condense our knowledge into The Structure 50, a list of the 50 companies that are influencing the way the cloud/infrastructure evolves. Read more »
Amazon Web Services has upped its enterprise credibility again, this time via a partnership with SAP that has certified certain SAP applications to run in production environments on the AWS cloud. With the designation, AWS joins a select group of enterprise-focused cloud providers. Read more »
Despite a lot of speculation lately about who’s winning the private-cloud race and what companies might be on the way out, it’s far too early to call the game in anyone’s favor. Adoption is picking up, but it’s nowhere near ubiquitous, so there’s plenty of time. Read more »
Software-as-a-Service startup New Relic has added a new, and free, capability to its application-performance management product that lets customers monitor their users’ experiences in real time. The bigger picture is how New Relic continues to show the way to do SaaS in a cloud-computing world. Read more »
Compute giant Hewlett-Packard has teamed up with Nvidia to make a server containing up to eight graphics processors designed for the high performance computing market. The two have built the world’s “Greenest Production Supercomputer” together, and the machine using Nvidia’s latest GPUs offers more performance. Read more »
What if you amassed petabytes of data and then realized you had nothing you wanted to do with it? It’s not enough to hoard data hoping for patterns; to create the true promise of a big data revolution the industry needs big apps. Read more »
According to a post today on the Facebook Engineering blog, the social networking leader undertook an effort called “Project Triforce,” which involved provisioning a replica production region from an existing cluster, to ensure the site could run smoothly across three regions without falling on its face. Read more »
As a recent McKinsey Global Institute report on big data points out, finding the appropriate balance between consumer privacy and business innovation will play a key role in ensuring that big data and the overall web advance at the pace required by both business and consumers. Read more »
VMware has acquired IT management provider Shavlik Technologies in an attempt to simplify for small- and medium-sized business the process of managing their machines. Shavlik brings an interesting set of new capabilities to VMware, including the ability to manage physical machines and a SaaS delivery model. Read more »
At Structure 2011, hear from top executives from leading companies and the most innovative minds building the next-generation of the cloud. Find out where cloud services are headed and how they’ll affect everything from application development to data center design. Read more »
We are moving from the Information Age to the Insight Age, and as part of that shift we need a compute architecture that will handle the storage and processing required all without requiring a power plant hooked up to every data center. What architecture will win? Read more »
In the past 10 years VMware has executed a remarkable strategy to topple enterprise software incumbents and emerge as an ecosystem kingpin. Time and again, it seems as though VMware is beating Microsoft at its own game. But a look deeper reveals that is no surprise. Read more »
Startup Calxeda has a big idea: use cell phone chips to create low-power servers. Reducing energy consumption is something that data center operators are increasingly paying attention to as a way to lower costs and Calxeda will be rolling out its product in 2012. Read more »
Join GigaOM Pro and Rackspace at our upcoming webinar, The Competitive Cloud – Creating Competitive Business Advantage Through Cloud Computing. This free, one-hour analyst roundtable will take place on Wednesday, May 25 at 10 a.m. PDT. Read more »
Typesafe, founded by Scala creator Martin Odersky and Akka creator Jonas Boner, created a platform for developers based on the two technologies. Here’s why Greylock invested in the startup. Read more »
Cisco is having a rough time — announcing a restructuring, layoffs and lowering its revenue forecast — but the server market is a bright spot for the networking giant. Yesterday, Cisco said it’s set to hit a run rate of $900 million in its server business. Read more »
Is the Foursquare, Twitter, or Mint.com of real time energy data just around the corner? GridGlo, a year-old startup working on combining energy data with other big data sets, launched on Wednesday, with a plan to sell apps around energy info to utilities. Read more »
Akamai has created a partnership with Riverbed Networks to improve the delivery of enterprise applications over both public and private networks, giving Akamai a foothold in the enterprise market as cloud computing heats up. It’s a response to the changes wrought by a more connected world. Read more »
The CEO of Vigilent (formerly called Federspiel Controls) Mark Housley, says there’s been so little technology introduced into cooling systems for data centers “it’s almost criminal.” Vigilent provides smart software via a wireless sensor network to manage and optimize these cooling systems. Read more »
Facebook’s new data center in Oregon has gotten its fair share of attention for Facebook’s decision to open up the energy efficient design. But here’s another reason to recognize the data center: Facebook has installed a smart lighting system courtesy of startup Redwood Systems. Read more »
EMC is throwing its weight behind Hadoop. Today, at the EMC World, the storage giant announced a slew of Hadoop-centric products, including a specialized appliance for Hadoop-based big data analytics and two separate Hadoop distributions. EMC’s entry is going to shake-up the Hadoop market. Read more »
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 »
