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Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 07:01:55 +0000

Big data and Platform-as-a-Service offerings highlighted the second quarter, suggesting that we can expect to see a shift in enterprise IT practices around application development and analytics very soon. On the PaaS front, we saw new projects like DotCloud and Cloud Foundry gain incredible momentum in just a few short months. The big-data activity ranged from major new Hadoop vendors to heavy investment in flash storage that will speed the serving of data to processing engines. In other areas, we saw an uptick in cloud-computing plans from large vendors, OpenStack continued to mature and pick up both contributors and users, and Facebook caught our eye by launching an open-source project around the designs for its specialized servers and data centers. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Salesforce.com, IBM, Heroku and Calxeda. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Acunu’s quest to make big data run faster

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 13:00:32 +0000

Tim Moreton CEO of Acunu

Big data can sometimes mean big infrastructure to run everything on, which can mean slower performance as the hardware struggles to read from or write to a database at the same speed it can process the data. Some companies are tackling these issues with even more specialized databases, while others are trying to speed up access to data by adding more memory. Acunu offers a mix of both, which is why we chose it as one of our Structure 2011 Launchpad companies.

The startup wants to help improve data stores by providing an underlying file system that makes the databases run faster. It’s a layer between the database and an SSD optimized to boost performance of a particular database. The London startup, founded in May 2009 raised about 3.1 million pounds ($4.9 million) in a seed and Series A round from Eden Ventures, Oxford Technology Management and Pentech Ventures LLP. The alternative to Acunu is to add more hardware or perhaps better tune your applications — tasks that can be both expensive and time-consuming.

Tim Moreton, the CEO, explained to me that the company’s first file system optimization works for Cassandra with a second version aimed at better Hadoop integration. However, it won’t stop there because other big data stores are used for other applications, and Acunu doesn’t want to be a niche service to boost the performance of one data store. So expect support for new data stores in the coming months — although Moreton was tight-lipped about which ones — as Acunu strives to become a real platform.

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Red-hot DotCloud is Structure 2011 LaunchPad winner

Colleen Taylor — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 23:35:53 +0000

Our LaunchPad finalists at Structure reflected the cloud’s growth over the past few years. The few that provide core cloud services are taking innovative approaches, and many of the other companies provide services that go well beyond core functionality. The judges — Mayfield Fund’s Navin Chaddha, Norwest Venture Partners’ Matthew Howard, Silicon Valley Bank’s John Lee and Sequoia Capital’s Luis Robles — and the audience both agreed on the winner: DotCloud.

Here are some highlights from the presentations:

Acunu CEO Tim Moreton demonstrated how his company helps enterprises achieve “consistently and predictably higher performance” from their commodity hardware systems. Acunu’s technology combines storage stack pipeline into a single platform, promising less latency and more range read throughput.
Beyondcore CEO Arijit Sengupta described how his San Mateo-based company helps clients utilize the cloud as much as possible by ensuring the privacy and security of their sensitive data. Beyondcore’s SplitSecure technology splits–and later recombines — private information from the more general data that can be stored in the cloud.
BigSwitch co-founder Kyle Forster demonstrated his company’s Open Flow-based technology platform that purportedly brings the benefits of cloud computing and virtualization to the networking space. According to Forster, the Palo Alto, California-based BigSwitch aims to become the “VMware of networking.”
Cloudability, led by CEO Mat Ellis, provides a web-based dashboard that allows companies to see all their cloud costs in one place. The Portland, Oregon-based startup, which sends its clients alerts when its cloud spending spikes, aims to be “the Mint.com for the cloud.”
CloudFloor CTO Imad Mouline demonstrated the company’s cloud management and optimization service. The Waltham, Massachusetts-based company has built its service to help both IT and business people get control and visibility over their cloud operations.
DotCloud CEO Solomon Hyes described his company’s platform-as-a-service offering, that allows developers to run any major application or database stack in the cloud, regardless of the programming language or database it utilizes. The San Francisco-based startup received both the judge’s choice and audience choice awards for its Structure Launchpad presentation.
GenieDB founder Dr. Jack Kreindler described how his company aims to solve large-scale distributed data problems with its geodiverse datafabric. The Orange County, Calif.-based startup has developed a datafabric that combines SQL and NoSQL for platform-as-a-service providers and cloud builders.
PHP Fog founder and CEO Lucas Carlson talked about his Portland, Oregon-based company’s platform-as-a-service technology aimed at PHP developers. PHP Fog hopes to drastically reduce the time it takes for developers to build an application, potentially helping them save time and money upfront and system and scaling costs over time.
Real-Status CEO Royce Murphy demonstrates his company’s modeling and visualization software product HyperGlance. The Cambridge, UK-based company purportedly helps companies visualize their experience in moving and hosting their data in the cloud.
vCider CEO Chris Marino shows off his company’s on-demand distributed virtual switch product for the cloud. vCider works as a self-service overlay on top of existing networking structures.
Zerto CEO Ziv Kedem launches the company out of stealth mode, announcing its technology for ensuring disaster recovery in the cloud. Zerto aims to help companies feel more comfortable with moving critical applications to the cloud by ensuring business continuity and disaster recovery by replicating data in a virtualized, hyper-visor layer.

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Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 15:23:33 +0000

Two markets stand out above all else when looking at the first quarter of 2011: infrastructure as a service (IaaS) — the epitome of cloud computing — and big data. Amazon Web Services continues to lead the IaaS space in terms of customers and innovation, while Rackspace, buoyed by momentum around OpenStack, will be its primary competitor for mainstream customers. In the big data space, there are so many players and terms floating about it’s difficult for outsiders to get a handle on who’s who and what’s what, though such activity validates the technologies. Other developments this quarter included HP’s impending presence in the cloud computing and big data spaces and the realization that Intel won’t be left to die if low-power servers based on x86 processors catch on like the buzz late last year suggests they will. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Microsoft, Cloudera, SeaMicro and Facebook. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Exclusive: Big Data Startup Acunu Raises Small Funding

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 19:48:47 +0000

Data storage startup Acunu has closed on a £2.2 million ($3.6 million) Series A round to help bring its first product to market. The London-based company raised the money from Eden Ventures, Oxford Technology Management and Pentech Ventures LLP, and the round brings Acunu’s total funding to £3.1 million.

Acunu makes software that will help solid state drives act as a more efficient bridge between expensive, in-memory RAM and cheap-but-slow hard disks. Instead of writing to hard drives and leaving information locked away, today’s applications want access — and quickly — to a much larger percentage of data stored in memory or on memcached servers or SSDs near the web server. But that speed comes at a cost, and the closer to the compute the storage is, the more expensive it is. SSDs are emerging as a good compromise, but Acunu believes there’s a niche it can fulfill by rewriting the software stack for SSDs.

The Acunu software runs on commodity servers, and appears optimized for solid state drives. It’s in private beta with a few undisclosed companies in the social media, advertising and cloud computing sectors participating. The software kernel uses a modified version of the Cassandra database for input and allows for multiple queries on distributed databases, giving one a unified view of the databases, which is key for companies with multiple data stores around the world.

For more on the topic of big data, including some hot startups, I hope to see you at our Structure: Big Data event on March 23 in New York.

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