Web infrastructure is a hot topic today, after Amazon Web Services experienced an outage over the weekend, and after Facebook released some interesting details about its Hadoop cluster on Friday. Even LinkedIn is making headlines by expanding into a new Los Angeles data center. Read more »
CloudSwitch today released version 2.0 of CloudSwitch Enterprise, which should help in the company’s quest to become an integral part of customers’ environments. Our conversation focused on the company’s future plans and how it’s bucking the seeming trend toward grabbing as much venture capital as possible. Read more »
Computers that can deliver an exaflop of performance — producing a billion billion calculations per second — aren’t the stuff of science fiction. But according to one researcher, an exascale supercomputer could require 7 GW of power. Clearly that needs to come down. Read more »
After losing out on 3PAR to HP, Dell satisfied its storage fix by securing an agreement to buy Compellent Technologies for $960 million. The deal gives Dell a solid enterprise-class storage maker that can help bulk up Dell’s data center offering. Read more »
Amazon’s new 5TB object limit in S3 made quite a splash, as has EC2 in Ireland, where it now accounts for one-third of all web-facing servers. While AWS is attracting new users, others, like Cisco with cloud developers and Datameer with data analysts — are trying. Read more »
Amazon Web Services has upped the maximum image size in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to 5TB from 5GB. Clearly, a 1,000X increase is significant and probably is driven by the new class of customers AWS is catering to with its Cluster Compute and GPU Instances. Read more »
Heated rivalries keep everything interesting, so it’s good to see that “Do No Evil” Google is up to the task of trading blows with Microsoft in the cloud collaboration space. Today, it took offense to being omitted from bidding in the USDA contract that Microsoft won, […] Read more »
The Apache Software Foundation resigned its seat on the Java SE/EE Executive Committee Thursday, according to a blog post and email sent out to apache.org committers. Apache had threatened to leave the committee last month over licensing concerns for its software. Read more »
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said embracing social media and collaboration can obliterate hierarchies and transform companies. And he should know. It’s already happening inside Salesforce with his enterprise social networking product Chatter. Benioff spoke at the GigaOM Net:Work conference about the company’s shift to social. Read more »
Amazon Web Services jumped on the mobile-application development bandwagon today with software development kits for both the Google Android and Apple iOS operating systems. The move underscores the need for cloud providers – even the mighty AWS – to target the increasingly important mobile-developer market. Read more »
The analysts at Pike Research came out with a report this morning that claims that the adoption of cloud computing will lead to a 38 percent reduction in worldwide data center energy use by 2020. I’d like to respectfully disagree with such a simplistic finding. Read more »
Compellent announced today that it is in talks with Dell about a possible acquisition. Compellent would be a nice score for Dell. After failing to close the deal with 3PAR over the summer, Dell still needs a big acquisition to bolster its storage lineup. Read more »
Believe it or not, there was cloud activity today outside of Salesforce.com buying Heroku. What struck me was Oracle defining Java victory on its own terms, Microsoft announcing the forthcoming SQL Azure Reporting, SAP’s mission to change BI and open source expert Matt Asay leaving Canonical. Read more »
Marc Benioff’s insistence on calling Salesforce.com a cloud computing company used to draw a few laughs. That’s been changing over the past several months with offerings like VMforce and Database.com, and its acquisition of PaaS pioneer Heroku for $212 million is the icing on the cake. Read more »
Salesforce.com’s decision to buy Heroku for $212 million seems to be a giving Ruby developers a pause, making them wonder about the future of their beloved platform. Heroku CEO says there is no reason to worry, as he outlines the future plans and Salesforce’s intentions. Read more »
Heroku had built its Ruby-specific Platform-as-a-Service on top of the Amazon Web Services infrastructure. It has been a shining example of Amazon’s cloud success. But what happens to the platform, now that Amazon rival, Salesforce is buying the company. Read more »
Salesforce is bulking up its position as a cloud platform for developers by agreeing to snap up Heroku, a Ruby application Platform-as-a-Service for $212 million. The deal will further establish Salesforce as a platform for app developers along with its VMforce enterprise cloud collaboration with VMware. Read more »
There’s a lot to talk about today if you’re a cloud developer. Aside from Database.com, we have Amazon Web Services achieving PCI compliance, a rundown of developer-centric cloud strategies, an argument that services trumps APIs and a question on whether PaaS providers should publicize their shortcomings. Read more »
Joyent today launched three new services targeted at online gaming studios. They’re noteworthy on their own because of the natural symbiosis between online and mobile games and cloud computing, but they’re also part of a greater trend of prepackaging cloud solutions for specific audiences. Read more »
Salesforce.com today gave the world true cloud data portability. Kind of. Database.com supports applications written in most any language and running atop most any public cloud. Yes, users are tied to Database.com to achieve this capability, but it’s another step toward true cloud choice. Read more »
Cloud Computing has been growing in influence and the potential of the market is only coming into focus. A handy infographic from Cloud Hyper Market shows how far we have come. A breakdown of the market and trends, by the numbers. Read more »
Rackspace today launched two new services targeting the enterprise customers: Cloud Connect, which allows folks to seamlessly integrate Rackspace Cloud and dedicated hosting. Cloud Connect, which was released from beta at the beginning of November. Critical Sites is a monitoring service for large customers. Read more »
It truly was a busy day in cloud computing, with AWS announcing its DNS service and Cisco forging a partnership with BMC Software, as well as comments on private clouds vs. public clouds, and news that Acadia might be fading into a formal VCE entity. Read more »
Nimbula Director is now available as a public beta release. Nimbula has received lots of attention since emerging from stealth mode in late June, primarily because of its founders’ pedigrees as the creators and builders of Amazon EC2, but now Nimbula’s product has to prove itself. Read more »
In Cancun, Mexico, amidst the second week of the U.N.’s climate negotiations, Hara announced that it has scored a mother of a deal to help state-run utility Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Authority save $3 billion over 10 years. Read more »
Cloud computing hopes to deliver convenient, on-demand access to shared pools of computing resources that can be provisioned with minimal effort. But since the virtualized environment becomes even more dynamic, complex and real-time in the cloud, the benefits of IT analytics become even more dramatic. Read more »
Suddenly, it seems, Java PaaS, an area once devoid of options, is swimming with choices. Makara, CloudBees, App Engine, Windows Azure and more all support Java. Now, it’s not a matter of who’ll step up and offer a Java-capable PaaS service, but which approaches are sustainable. Read more »
Since virtualization has created a dynamic management environment that defies human analysis, any new solution will need to be much more advanced than any approach requiring human interpretation and/or manual processes. The answer lies in advanced mathematics and automation found in “behavior learning” technology. Read more »
If you’ve been wondering why Enterprise 2.0 hasn’t taken off like it should, maybe it’s because companies have forgotten about business intelligence. Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini analyzes BI’s failure to adapt to the real-time web and offers a glimpse into what future of BI should be. Read more »
Further Wikileaks analysis aside, Google was all over tech headlines over the past day. It upgraded App Engine, leaked a secret new consumer storage feature, and bought a data center hotel housing some of the biggest names in data centers and business. Read more »
The advent of virtualization and cloud computing infrastructure has made conventional, rules-based approaches to systems management obsolete. But a new breed of performance management technology that uses machine learning and analytics, can enable end-to-end management in the cloud. But first, we need to understand the landscape. Read more »
Amazon Web Services is taking its CloudWatch monitoring service to the next level, announcing on Friday morning a half-dozen new features. Cloud monitoring is becoming big business, so anything AWS can do to keep those dollars in-house is probably worth the effort. Read more »
Chalk another one (two, actually) up for Hadoop. Among the big news today is Apple stepping up its Hadoop development efforts, and Datameer targeting social-gaming companies for its Hadoop-powered spreadsheet application. Elsewhere, data center spending is still high, and IBM is looking to revolutionize high-end processors. Read more »
The story of Wikileaks hosting its Cablegate data on Amazon EC2 strikes me on so many levels. As a journalist, American citizen, and soon-to-be J.D., I’ve thought about freedom of speech, and I’m flabbergasted that Wikileaks hosted the site with a U.S. provider on U.S. soil. Read more »
10gen, the company providing commercial support for the open-source MongoDB database, has raised $6.5 million in funding led by Sequoia Capital. Its CEO says NoSQL will become the third leg of the data storage stool for enterprises, and MongoDB is in the lead. Read more »
Every day covering infrastructure forces one to think about what’s next, not just what’s happening right now. Today, that came in the form of thinking about many-core GPUs in mobile devices, and in considering how Big Data tools might find their way to the masses. Read more »
Amazon has removed WikiLeaks’ website from its servers, a move that appears to be a result of pressure from the U.S. government to not support the document-leaking organization. Senator Joe Lieberman said he planned to ask the company about the extent of its involvement with WikiLeaks. Read more »
Could 1.7 billion processor hours put a dent in the fight against climate change? That’s what the DOE is hoping, and this week unveiled a program to donate computing power from two super computers for dozens of projects working on energy innovation. Read more »
Cisco this morning announced its intent to acquire LineSider Technologies, a purchase that will give Cisco advanced capabilities in managed virtualized network resources. As Cisco evolves its cloud computing capabilities, especially, technologies that make network management more dynamic will make Cisco a more-appealing choice. Read more »
We’re thankful for the trend of more energy efficient data centers finally offering a competitive advantage for companies, and so are startups. Wednesday morning, Racktivity, which makes energy efficient gear and software for data centers, announced it has raised funding. Read more »
