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 »
If there’s a cloud for compute, for storage and any other variation under the sun why shouldn’t there be a VoIP cloud to deliver telephony over the Internet? With the launch of Whistle, the 2600 Hertz Project will make building a VoIP cloud cheaper and easier. Read more »
Hadoop is the talk of the town when it comes to big data, but it’s not without faults that have some users begging for an alternative. Like many open source projects, it’s relatively unpolished and often requires a great deal of learning and much strenuous customization […] Read more »
While Michael Dell is bummed he didn’t see the tablet revolution coming, he’s also not sweating it much, apparently. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, the CEO of Dell Inc. says the company’s main focus remains the enterprise market. Read more »
With flash storage subject to production issues and relatively high costs compared to other mobile device components, maybe it’s time to revisit the idea of broadband enabling near-limitless virtual storage. We’re not there just yet, but we’re getting closer due to smarter apps and improved connectivity. Read more »
The four-day-long Amazon Web Services outage was no doubt a traumatic experience for many customers, but that didn’t have to be the case. There were plenty of users that were not affected, were minimally affected or that acted in a hurry to resolve the problem. Read more »
Amazon Web Services has put the outage behind them and now are getting back to normal, according to the latest status update from Amazon Web Services on its Service Health Dashboard. Performance data from Cedexis shows what it meant in terms of network latency. Read more »
BigSwitch Networks, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based network virtualization startup founded on the principles of the OpenFlow standard, has raised $13.75 million in a Series A financing, led by Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures. The company’s goal is to become the VMware of networking. Read more »
The popular web sites down today because of the Amazon Web Services outage are getting most of the attention, but they were only a handful among the hundred-plus that were affected, including at least three popular platform-as-a-service providers — Heroku, Engine Yard and DotCloud. Read more »
In an afternoon chat today at Green:Net, Google Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl explained that the future of data center efficiency will not come from improved data center designs themselves, but from more-efficient hardware and cleaner sources of energy. Read more »
With the world population booming and energy consumption growing, the challenge is on to counter the impacts with smart solutions, said Microsoft’s Rob Bernard. He said cloud-based software, creative uses of data and innovative interfaces will help create smart systems that can address the growing problems. Read more »
Amazon Web Services claims to be making significant progress in restoring functionality to a large number of EC2, Elastic Block Storage and Relational Database Service instances that went down due to a “networking event” in the early-morning hours and affected a number of popular web sites. Read more »
Updated: Today, Amazon’s Web Services have hit some bumps in the road, taking down a variety of popular sites such as Foursquare, Quora and Paper.li. Since clouds do fail perhaps the best thing to do is provide information and maybe a dollop of humor. Read more »
A group of the Internet’s most recognized brands — from Facebook to Apple to Twitter to Amazon — have received failing grades when it comes to using clean power for their web services, according to a new report unveiled by Greenpeace on Thursday at our Green:Net event. Read more »
Watch Green Revolution Cooling’s liquid-cooled server tech, which involves dunking servers in mineral oil. The benefits are more efficient — read less expensive — cooling for data center operators. Read more »
Just like every vendor now has a cloud product and every company has a cloud strategy in place, big data efforts also will become ubiquitous over the next couple years, and the two very well might merge in the near future. Read more »
The most interesting part about yesterday’s announcement that Groupon is using the Cloudera Distribution of Hadoop wasn’t the actual use but, rather, the insight that Groupon is “building a world-class infrastructure” of which Hadoop will be a key part. But recruiting big-data-savvy talent is getting rather pricey. Read more »
Dave Girouard, president of Google Enterprise, in a conversation earlier this week, outlined Google’s cloud strategy and its long-term plans, and how it is different from other cloud providers including Amazon Web Services. He talks about Google’s two areas of focus – apps and big data. Read more »
