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 »
The growing Java PaaS market will soon need to make room for CumuLogic, an startup led by a team of Sun Microsystems veterans. The Sun connection is notable because Sun was the Java owner and development leader before its acquisition by Oracle early last year. Read more »
Intel blew out its 2010 and fourth quarter financial results last week, which inspired a technology and business blogger to ask whether or not Intel’s incredible growth (or in general microprocessor growth) will continue next year and in the decades following. Does compute follow Jevons paradox? Read more »
Today’s links offer further proof that technologies like Hadoop and NoSQL aren’t going anywhere — and might even be expanding — and that choosing the right cloud computing solution really should be about what’s best for the individual business (e.g., public vs. private, or available vs. reliable). Read more »
Cloud provider GoGrid has expanded its Infrastructure-as-a-Service catalog by launching a Hosted Private Cloud that maintains all the features multitenant clouds, but on dedicated physical servers. It’s an interesting tactic, and it highlights the different value propositions and visions of the leading cloud providers. Read more »
Amazon Web Services, which built and popularized cloud computing with its Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Storage Service has moved up the stack from infrastructure to providing Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, its brand new Platform-as-a-Service play. With Beanstalk, Amazon hopes to outgrow the competition. Read more »
Some might call this past quarter in infrastructure transformative. The rise of ARM-based processing suggests the days of x86 dominance are numbered, while the Amazon Web Services-WikiLeaks controversy cast light on cloud computing’s legal aspects, and big data got bigger as the Hadoop ecosystem expanded. Read more »
The first non-Rackspace OpenStack-based cloud-storage service is in beta, but it’s just the first in what should be many products based on the open source cloud project. Internap’s XIPCloud Storage platform provides a self-service, web-based offering to complement the hosting providers existing dedicated storage offerings. Read more »
EMC launched a slew of new products and a new product line that it hopes will keep it relevant in a changing IT world where cloud computing and products with a more consumer feel are changing the dynamic at both ends of the spectrum. Read more »
Some might call this past quarter in the infrastructure space transformative. The rise of ARM-based processing suggests the days of x86 dominance might be coming to an end, while the Amazon Web Services-WikiLeaks controversy cast new light on the legal aspects of cloud computing. Big data got bigger, meanwhile, as the Hadoop ecosystem expanded, and amid all these cutting-edge technologies, two archaic topics — Novell and Java — proved they aren’t going anywhere soon. Companies mentioned in this report include Intel, AMD, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Yahoo, Appistry, VMware, Joyent and Microsoft. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Tilera, a chip design firm that’s building a 100-core processor for hugely parallel compute problems, has raised $45 million in funding from investors that include Artis Capital Management, WestSummit Capital Management and Comerica Bank. The company has raised a total of $109 million. Read more »
The issue of identity is challenging online and few have come up with solutions to help a single real-world person adopt multiple personas for their business and personal lives online. The CEO of UnboundID makes the case that your phone or cable company could do it. Read more »
Database startup Clustrix revealed the identities of four customers today, strong evidence that there’s something to its webscale SQL database beyond the $30 million investment that Clustrix has raised thus far. The customers announced are AOL, Photobox, Box.net and iOffer. Read more »
New cloud provider NephoScale announced its presence among IaaS providers earlier this week, touting itself as “an advanced cloud service for serious programmers.” However, I’m afraid its message might fall upon deaf ears, as there’s little evidence the world is clamoring for another IaaS cloud. Read more »
The server market has experienced four phases of massive change over the last 25 years. Each time, the incumbent technology was replaced by “lesser” technology that offered to get the job done reasonably well but for a fraction of the price. Now it’s ARM’s turn. Read more »
Intel’s fourth-quarter earnings make up for the dearth of news elsewhere. There are so many questions about Intel’s future that one has to wonder if this might be the last record-setting quarter. The other links point to worthwhile analysis on Hadoop, Cloudant and cloud security. Read more »
Google blogged this morning about a new no-planned-downtime for Google Apps, a promise it’s able to make because of its globally distributed infrastructure estimated at more than 1 million servers. Google’s expansive infrastructure gives it multiple options for migrating workloads during planned downtime. Read more »
Here are a couple of “what-ifs” to chew on: What if a supercomputer beats two super humans at Jeopardy ? What if Steve Ballmer is the next executive to leave Microsoft? We’ll know the answer to at least one of those questions in February. Read more »
Enomaly has managed to cobble together between 10,000 and 25,000 servers available on any given day for its SpotCloud market, said CEO Ruven Cohen, and today will open its beta program to more sellers. Next month, it will open the market up to all buyers. Read more »
Private businesses in London are bracing for power shortages during the 2012 Olympics, and it appears data centers located within the city won’t be spared, a turn of events that could have U.K. businesses turning to cloud computing. Read more »
Online data privacy has been in the spotlight for a variety of reasons over the past year, but before Congress, regulators or courts can give any legal clarity to the issue, they need to answer some fundamental questions about area of law even applies. Read more »
General Electric is grabbing a piece of the booming data center energy business, with a $520 million offer for Lineage Power Holdings, a provider of gear for the $20 billion-per-year data center and telecom power conversion industry. Read more »
A paper showing how Google’s Priority Inbox feature works shows how the future of the web can evolve to deliver hyper-personalized results to users while relying on a huge sample of people connected through the cloud. Priority Inbox isn’t just good for productivity, it’s the future. Read more »
Rackspace and Akamai have entered into a relationship through which Rackspace will resell a wide range of Akamai’s CDN services across Rackspace’s business lines. The partnership appears to be another indicator that Rackspace is doing everything it can to put pressure on Amazon Web Services. Read more »
Today’s links pose some good questions about both cloud computing and NoSQL. For cloud computing, the question is about what’s the right blend of old-school and new-school, and for NoSQL it’s whether the next year will bring consolidation, proliferation or both. Read more »
PHP Fog has raised $1.8 million for its PaaS cloud targeting PHP developers. Just as Heroku attracted large numbers of Ruby developers, a PHP PaaS offering certainly should attract users, even if PHP Fog isn’t the only one at that dance. Read more »
The big items today were the resignations at Microsoft and AMD, but there are a couple other important goings on, like Oracle getting sued for essentially the same behavior that accused SAP of committing, and Switch Communications planning a huge expansion for its SuperNAP data center. Read more »
Nvidia said today Intel will pay the graphics chipmaker $1.5 billion as part of a legal settlement. The agreement shows how fast things are changing for Intel and the computing industry as power efficiency is trumping performance, and entertainment is winning out over productivity. Read more »
Bob Muglia is leaving Microsoft. More accurately, he’s “retiring” this summer because CEO Steve Ballmer decided that the Server and Tools Business, which Muglia leads, needs new leadership. One has to ask what’s going on at Microsoft and what Steve Ballmer has in mind. Read more »
There’s long been talk of Nvidia joining the server CPU business, but most believed it would go the x86 route. Instead, it chose ARM. Since ARM’s dominance in mobile devices means it is the processor of the future, other companies need a game plan, and fast. Read more »
MeghaWare, when it officially launches in the spring, will give users a single portal to view and manage the entirety of their web identities — from Google Apps to Netflix to, interestingly, Amazon S3. It’s a strange combination of services, until you consider the business model. Read more »
Cloud CRM provider Salesforce has announced the acquisition of web conferencing and meeting tools provider Dimdim. Salesforce says that it will use Dimdim’s presence and on-demand meeting and collaboration technologies and development team to add new real-time communication capabilities to its Chatter collaboration platform. Read more »
Amazon Web Services has made available two additional support options for customers of its cloud computing services. Customers can now choose from the Bronze level, which costs $49 a month, or the Platinum level, which costs at least $15,000 a month. Read more »
I really do hate CES. Not because I dislike gadgets or the saturation of CES stories in the media, but because I live in Las Vegas. Try getting a table at a restaurant in any Strip property anywhere. Or, better yet, don’t — you won’t succeed. Read more »
Despite the fact that it’s still a mystery how big the cloud computing business really is, it’s already having huge effects on the IT world, including shortening the timeline from idea to product, maximizing profit per server and changing CIOs’ jobs. Read more »
Nvidia, the graphics chipmaker, today announced Project Denver, a plan to use the same chip architecture found in cell phones in servers. The move broadens Nvidia’s relationship with ARM, expands its market and puts Nvidia in even more competition with Intel. Read more »
In the case of the following companies (and one open-source project) — ranging from Cisco to Twitter — I think that although they made lots of headlines in the past year, the true effects of their actions won’t be realized until later this year. Read more »
Gluster today announced streaming music pioneer Pandora as a customer, which is telling in a couple ways. It helps validate the billions that large vendors and investors have poured into scale-out storage providers, and it suggests a possible target market for these providers going forward. Read more »
Among the most interesting cloud discussions around the web today were those about what we learned about cloud computing in 2010, how Net Neutrality will affect the delivery of cloud services and what cloud providers presently offer the most-complete portfolios. Read more »
