Hewlett-Packard is putting more of its chips on OpenStack as a key foundation for its upcoming public, private and hybrid cloud implementations. HP says its Converged Cloud will amalgamate existing HP technologies and OpenStack so applications can be managed uniformly across cloud types. Read more »
Instagram is pretty proud of the infrastructure it built atop the Amazon Web Services cloud, but does an acquisition by Facebook mean goodbye to Amazon? If I were a betting man, I’d say there are already some engineers working really hard to make that happen. Read more »
Amazon’s popular S3 storage service shows no sign of slowing down. At the end of the first quarter, it was home to more than 905 billion objects, up from 762 billion for the previous quarter, according to the company’s Amazon Web Services blog. Read more »
According to analysts at Morgan Stanley, Amazon’s cloud computing division could be a shining star (even if not too bright) on the company’s long road toward increased profit margins. While margins are flat, there’s opportunity for growth as Amazon Web Services keeps evolving. Read more »
If you have a lot of unstructured data, don’t have (or want) a Hadoop cluster and can write Python jobs, Mortar Data has got the service for you. The New York-based startup is jumping into the fray with possibly the most lightweight Hadoop service yet. Read more »
Cloud computing is at the top of virtually every CIO’s interest list and is expected to grow 126.5 percent over the next two years. A new report on GigaOM Pro details each sector of cloud computing and forecasts a shift toward hybrid models in the enterprise community. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Now that at least some of the smoke has cleared from the blockbuster news that Citrix is putting its CloudStack technology into the Apache process to compete with former partner OpenStack, here are 5 takeaways emerging from the latest cloud kerfuffle. Read more »
A new Gartner list of cloud computing trends shows how nervous the burgeoning use of cloud makes IT departments, which traditionally controlled what applications and data ran and on what devices. That’s all changed and now IT has to change too. Read more »
Basho, a startup that’s already jumped into the NoSQL database deep end, just released cloud-based storage services built on that NoSQL foundation. Expect the competition to be fierce: RiakCS joins a huge pool of cloud storage offerings from everyone from Amazon to Zettanet. Read more »
Key to understanding big data is to move beyond simply examining the technology for data storage and analytics engines. Organizations preparing for a data-centric economy should also examine the roles of data quality, data obesity and data markets in the future of modern enterprises. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Morphlab’s latest mCloud uses uses all solid-state disks while also claiming Amazon Web Services-like pricing. The company’s newest offering, which is part of a partnership with Dell, targets service providers that want to add private cloud computing capabilities that interoperate with AWS as needed. Read more »
Amazon’s Eucalyptus deal, which gives it a better hybrid cloud story and solidifies the dominance of the AWS API, plus the ever-growing AWS feature set, aren’t necessarily all good news to PaaS and other partners that run their services on Amazon infrastructure. Read more »
Cloud computing, mobile computing and the consumerization of IT are changing the game for IT departments. Section one of our three-part report describes and quantifies each of these trends, demonstrating that they are real now, growing rapidly and perilous to ignore. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
It’s increasingly clear that no cloud is perfect. After public Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Windows Azure outages — the latest just this week — more business customers are evaluating multiple-cloud deployments to build in redundancy and hedge their cloud computing bets. Read more »
A new flock of vendors is offering capabilities that would enable private-to-public cloud bursting, or federation between clouds, to meet data privacy mandates, offer high availability to customers, and provide geographic reach. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The emergence of the big data phenomenon is fundamentally changing everything from the way companies operate to the way people interact to how the world deals with outbreaks of infectious diseases. Here we highlight 10 case studies illustrating how big data is changing the world. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
There’s a big change that is sweeping the business world — instead of buying their infrastructure by spending millions of dollars upfront, companies are now getting comfortable with the idea of paying for their needs as they go along. And that spells trouble for many. Read more »
New medium Elastic Compute Cloud instance fills the gap between — you guessed it — smaller and larger “medium” EC2 instances. That brings the total number of EC2 instances to 13 (for now) as Amazon keeps churning out options for every possible compute load. Read more »
Ray Ozzie, the former Microsoft executive charged with driving the development of Windows Azure, is evaluating Azure, along with Amazon Web Services and OpenStack, for use by Cocomo, his mysterious startup company. Read more »
Amazon isn’t the only cloud power slicing storage prices. On Tuesday Google cut the price on Google Cloud Storage by up to 15 percent in some cases. With this move and new front-end storage partners, Google appears to be making a serious play for enterprise storage. Read more »
When Amazon Web Services isn’t adding new services, it’s cutting prices on those it already offers. Late Monday, the company said it is cutting the price of its EC2, Amazon RDS, ElastiCache and Elastic MapReduce, according to a post on the AWS blog. Read more »
Zynga is in a tricky position technologically thanks to its new frenemy status with Facebook. Zynga claims 240 million active users, and it wants a lot more, but scaling to those heights might require one heck of a computing infrastructure. Read more »
RSA says the way to handle security threats is by harnessing big data, but the tools aren’t out there yet for mainstream business ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The more features that Amazon Web Services puts on its roster, the more nervous AWS partners — and some customers — get. As the company comes up the stack, adding workflow, richer database and other services, many partners and customers fear cloud lock-in. Read more »
Azure, Microsoft’s platform-as-a-service cloud, went down Monday night and stayed down for at least 10 hours. The news comes as Microsoft is trying to pitch two-year-old Azure as a safe and reliable platform for consumer and business applications. Read more »
The big hosting provider that, along with NASA, launched the open-source cloud infrastructure project two years ago, will start beta testing the software, running tens of thousands of computing instances as opposed to the hundreds under test now, said John Engates, Rackspace’s CTO. Read more »
With more than 45 million users already connected to his company’s cloud storage service, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston knows he has an infrastructure challenge ahead of him. That, Houston says, is a big reason Dropbox bought Cove, which brings with it Facebook engineering cred. Read more »
Infochimps, a startup best known for its data marketplace, is now offering a cloud-based service that takes the pain out of managing Hadoop and scale-out database environments. The company hopes its new cloud-based service can do for big data applications what PaaS did for web applications. Read more »
Amazon says its new Simple Workflow Service (SWS) will run applications that are distributed between customer sites and Amazon cloud infrastructure, thus further blurring the line between the customer’s own data center and their chosen cloud. Read more »
Cloud computing consultancy Cloudscaling is realigning its business around the open-source OpenStack framework, and it has a message for the world: If you want to use open-source software but operate like Amazon Web Services, we’re your man. Read more »
In its bid to stay the high-volume, low-margin provider of cloud storage, Amazon cut prices on standard S3 storage, according to the Amazon Web Services website. The price changes — good for the U.S. region — are retroactive to February 1. Read more »
As more companies put workloads on Amazon Web Services or other public cloud platforms, many are paying for more cloud than they need. That overprovisioning is the problem Cloudyn, an Israeli startup, is taking on with its new software as a service. Read more »
The most striking thing about Amazon’s Q4 filing was that head count was up a whopping 67 percent to 56,200 full- and part-time employees, compared with 33,700 from a year ago, according to Amazon’s 8-K filing; 67 percent is a very big number — even for Amazon. Read more »
If you’re like many of us, you’re already thinking over some New Year’s resolutions that will make you a better “you” in 2012. But how are the tech industries’ thought leaders approaching the new year? We asked 12 of them for their resolutions. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amazon Web Services is rolling out a new feature called Storage Gateway that lets companies upload data to its cloud-storage services directly from their on-premise storage systems. This should enable cloud cloud backup and cloud bursting without worries about latency as data traverses the Internet. Read more »
Joe Coyle, CTO of global integrator Capgemini, sees a lot of cloud pitches from all the major technology vendors — and God knows they all have a cloud strategy. Here’s what he thinks of the current state of the market. Read more »
Executives at NoSQL startups are keeping a brave face in response to Amazon Web Services’ new DynamoDB offering. They cite the new product as a validation, while generally dismissing the competitive ramifications of having Amazon now playing in the same pool. But is that confidence justified? Read more »
DynamoDB, AWS’ latest effort to rock the technology establishment, has many implications for other players in the big data and cloud computing markets. A new GigaOM Pro research note examines just who is affected, and how. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Another day, another Amazon web service: This time, Amazon is making it easier for authorized business users to manage their Amazon Web Services infrastructure after signing on — once — to their corporate network. That sign-on will give them access to AWS Management Console. Read more »
Somewhat lost in the greater story of Amazon Web Services’ new DynamoDB NoSQL database is that the new service runs atop a solid-state storage system. By abstracting those SSDs behind a NoSQL service, AWS is trying to prove that hardware presents greater opportunities than Infrastructure-as-a-Service alone. Read more »
