This week brought several examples of existing software and on-premise cloud solutions becoming a little easier to use or more widely available. While none were individually significant enough to spark dramatic transformation of the industry, these new tools, when put together, signify a maturing market. Read more »
Like most social games, Tribal Crossing applications have a very high database write rate –- changes to the game state must be stored so the user doesn’t lose her game score, “loot” or location. Tribal Crossing migrated from MySQL to Membase to support a higher write rate. Read more »
It was a big week for big data, with two key trends adding fuel to claims that data management and analysis will never be the same. Even laggards will be tempted to give big data tools a try to see what all the hype is about. Read more »
Netflix offers rent-by-mail and streaming movies. The shift from mail-order to streaming video had fairly significant implications for Netflix’s application infrastructure. Netflix realized it would need multiple geographically dispersed data centers and far more processing capacity so it turned to Amazon’s Web Services. Read more »
After two massive server crashes in November wrecked online ticket-sale launches and infuriated hopeful badgeholders, Comic-Con International has moved its ticketing engine to Amazon Web Serviced-based startup TicketLeap in anticipation of its third attempt — tomorrow morning — to sell badges for this summer’s event. Read more »
With more huge files and data sets making their way across the Internet every day, Aspera’s work of speeding the transfer of that data is never done. And although the company still focuses primarily on the enterprise, consumer content might be on the horizon. Read more »
Few would argue that Hadoop doesn’t have a bright future as a foundational element of big data stacks, but Piccolo, a new project out of New York University, is moving data in-memory in an attempt to improve parallel-processing performance beyond what Hadoop and/or MapReduce can do. Read more »
The Rackspace- and NASA-led OpenStack project released the code for its “Bexar” release this morning, which brings a slew of new features, as well as proofs of concept from large enterprises and major new contributors, such as Cisco. With Bexar, OpenStack is ready for production environments. Read more »
Its first product won’t even be available until this spring, but Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup ScaleXtreme already has big plans: to become, as CEO and Co-founder Nand Mulchandani puts it, “the Salesforce.com of the systems management market” by taking the complexity out of systems management. Read more »
With enterprise data volumes growing, business and IT leaders face significant opportunities and challenges from big data. The space, of course, is not without its obstacles — including plenty of privacy concerns — but in 2011, there are numerous sales-growth opportunities and new business models finally surfacing. Read more »
The cloud-storage funding train rolled on this morning with Atlanta-based startup SolidFire raising $11 million. It should be money well spent by the investors, as SolidFire plays at the intersection of two red-hot trends: primary cloud storage and SSDs. Read more »
Norman Nie helped create SPSS, one of the first companies to take advantage of the data computers enabled researchers and businesses to track. He spoke with me about why we need to speak to our data and how that conversation can change the way we innovate. Read more »
For months, Verizon has seemed to be trailing rival AT&T on smart grid initiatives. Not anymore, if news from the smart grid conference Distributech in San Diego this week is any indicator, including an announcement to offer a cloud-based smart meter management service with eMeter. Read more »
If the tale of Schooner Information Technology is any indication, the answer to the titular question is “no.” Today, Schooner, which just under two years ago launched its its high-powered, flash-based database appliance made a hard left turn to selling software only. Read more »
Much of the world’s most valuable information is trapped in digital sand, siloed in servers scattered around the globe. Our ability to harness big data, which will mature in the coming decade, is driven by advances in three areas: sensor networks, cloud computing, and machine learning. Read more »
Yahoo is ceasing development of its Yahoo Distribution of Hadoop and will be folding it back into the Apache Hadoop project. The company cites a goal “to make Apache Hadoop THE open source platform for big data” as a driving force behind its new strategy. Read more »
Imagine if companies could track the energy consumed by a lone click of a mouse to store photos in the cloud. It might sound like a pipe dream, but it could one day be reality. Read more »
Apple officially stopped producing and selling its Xserve servers today, but that doesn’t mean the consumer-centric company is done in the data center. Mac OS X as a guest operating system atop VMware is an intriguing notion should Apple decide to pursue it. Read more »
Just a month after hurriedly closing a deal to acquire competitor Stax Networks, CloudBees’ RUN@cloud Java platform as a service is available for public use. CloudBees deserves credit for making its offering available while others are still in development. Read more »
With enterprise data volumes growing, business and IT leaders face significant opportunities and challenges from big data. Using cloud-computing technologies, organizations are experimenting with distributed data stores, cloud compute capacity for data analytics, hosted data integration and even operational databases in the cloud. Hadoop/MapReduce, meanwhile, has moved past test and development stage to become a viable extension or alternative to traditional relational databases. Though the space is not without its obstacles, including plenty of privacy concerns, there are numerous sales-growth opportunities and new business models finally surfacing in 2011. Companies mentioned in this report include Google, IBM, Apple, Oracle, Salesforce and VMware. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Verizon announcing plans to buy Terremark for $1.4 billion is a big deal, but I don’t think Terremark will be the biggest winner as a result. Rather, I think Rackspace looks great as the company straddling the line between the MSP and cloud worlds. Read more »
Openwave’s next generation platform must support geographic redundancy, massive scalability and high availability. It has to distribute databases redundantly across multiple data centers and handle large customer datasets – varying from hundreds of terabytes to petabytes, and supporting thousands of transactions per second from each customer. Read more »
2010 has been dubbed the “Year of the Cloud” — and from an adoption perspective, this assertion holds true. But when it comes to realizing the benefits of cloud computing and truly running “IT as a business,” things are just beginning to heat up. Read more »
Jim Ousley, CEO and Chairman of Savvis is having a great day. Yesterday Verizon agreed to buy a rival for $1.4 billion, and today he has joined a small group of companies that are suddenly sought after as acquisition targets. In response Savvis stock has traded up. Read more »
Shutterfly is a popular Internet-based photo sharing and personal publishing company that manages a persistent store of more than 6 billion images with a transaction rate of up to 10,000 operations per second. Here’s why it made the journey from Oracle to MongoDB. Read more »
Michael Dell is talking this week talking about having acquisition plans in “software, data centers, cloud computing, storage and virtualization,” which raises questions about who it might be eying up. There are five vendors, in particular, that could give high value for a relatively low price. Read more »
Verizon has agreed to buy Terremark, a provider of managed and cloud services for $1.4 billion. The deal is an aggressive move to gain customers in the red-hot cloud computing market, and makes sense, as the network and the computer are moving ever closer. Read more »
Trend Micro maintains web reputation databases that allow intelligent detection of spam, phishing, or suspicious web sites. It processes data accumulating at the rate of about four petabytes per year. Here’s why Trend Micro settled on Apache Hbase as the core database of new elastic infrastructure. Read more »
BI vendor Jaspersoft has expanded its software’s support to include pretty much the entire gamut of big data tools available. There might not be much business demand for all these connectors right now, but it’s wise for Jaspersoft to establish its presence in this area early. Read more »
It’s a cloud grab bag, with everything from Amazon Web Services’ new Simple Email Service to debate over cloud APIs to VMware warning that profit margins will stay about the same through 2011. The unifying theme is the steady maturation of cloud technologies and pricing models. Read more »
Mobile-app-analytics startup Flurry is upgrading its data center network with Arista Networks 10 GigE switches, a move designed to improve network performance as Flurry continues to add both terabytes and nodes to its big data system. Is the network the hardware superstar in big data environments? Read more »
San Jose startup Cirtas Systems has a new CEO and raised an additional $22.5 million to advance its vision of helping enterprise customers store primary data in the cloud. Cirtas is riding a hot trend of shuttling storage between on-premise appliances and backend storage clouds. Read more »
Hewlett-Packard unveiled four cloud products in what I view as somewhat of a comeback tour for hardware giant after staying on the cloud sidelines for much of 2010. However, the products, which range from an IaaS play to some cloud-optimized hardware, aren’t all that new. Read more »
Two trends dominate today’s links – Java and stock prices. Some big names in trading have data center operators and Salesforce.com set for falling share prices, and in the world of Java it’s a neat inforgraphic and more claims of Google lifting code for Android. Read more »
Myspace’s gradual decline and a recent blog post have me wondering what the flip side is of rapid scaling. I wonder what social-media sites do with their expansive infrastructures once they no longer need them to meet high demand. They can’t just scale them back, right? Read more »
Amazon Web Services needed to develop its own flavor of PaaS, the cleverly named Elastic Beanstalk, to keep up with cloud development trends, but that doesn’t mean the rest of its IaaS brethren need to follow suit – at least not in the immediate future. Read more »
With the launch is its new low-end VNX line, EMC shifted focus away from its high-end Symmetrix products and down to the other end of the spectrum. And, all of a sudden, Dell’s move to acquire Compellent looks much smarter. Read more »
It’s an interesting collection of links today, most of which are focused on money — specifically, Google’s sky-high Q4 infrastructure spending and AMD’s continually dismal performance. There’s also a great analysis of the PaaS market post-Elastic Beanstalk and a look at Heroku’s recent security hole. Read more »
In the wake of venture capital firms investing more in 2010 than they had in the previous two years, and some significant funding for hardware startups in the last 12 months, I wondered if underneath the social media frenzy there’s a hardware renaissance taking place. Read more »
If today’s links are any indication, we could see some serious changes to once-lauded IT practices and trends. There’s a call for PaaS evolution, talk that Cisco really does fear Xsigo and even stats showing Rackspace nipping at Amazon’s heels in web hosting. Read more »
