With Microsoft Hyper-V 3 coming down the pike, and Red Hat revving its KVM push, VMware executives continue to tout vSphere as the best way to virtualize everything — including the mission-critical databases and ERP systems that power businesses of all sizes. Read more »
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 »
Everywhere you look, you see the web economy booming and growing like never before. And that boom is spurring demand for data centers like never before. A new survey by Campos Research & Analysis on behalf of Digital Realty Trust, has data to back it up. Read more »
There’s a reason Larry Ellison called cloud computing “nonsense” and why he still won’t permit Amazon-style metered pricing for Oracle’s mainstream database and middleware. George Gilbert lets us in on the company’s expensive secret. Read more »
Sony’s gaming arm is moving at least some of its online workloads from Amazon Web Services to the rival OpenStack cloud-computing stack implemented by Rackspace, according to a report. Such moves show a growing threat to AWS from OpenStack-based rivals. Read more »
Cloud computing provider Virtustream, a hot player in the enterprise cloud space, with a cloud platform designed for mission-critical and heavy-duty enterprise applications such as SAP, has raised another $15 million in investment capital. The money brings Virtustream’s total funding to $75 million. Read more »
Boston and Cambridge are battling it out to be the site of Google’s proposed expansion in the Hub. Google’s current local headquarters is in Kendall Square, but it’s unclear if it can expand there. Boston is pitching its Innovation District to the search giant. 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 »
Whether you think cloud computing creates or kills jobs depends on what kind of jobs you’re talking about and how companies will use the IT savings they reap in moving to the cloud. Consultant David Linthicum sees validity in the cloud-as-jobs-creator argument. 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 »
A new Microsoft-funded IDC report purports to show that the adoption of cloud computing will create 8.8 million new jobs worldwide — 1.1 million in the U.S. — in by 2015. That factoid strained credulity among Microsoft partners and IT pros. 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 »
Everybody who has watched The Terminator knows about Skynet, the computing system that becomes self-aware and decides to destroy humanity. But I look at cloud computing and automated systems and I fear something much more depressing: the total leisure paradise of the movie Wall-E. Read more »
Wal-Mart is looking to use its leverage in Hollywood to accelerate the movie industry’s move to cloud-based storage and digital commerce. In the process, it could steal a march on other providers of cloud-based media lockers like Apple, Google and Amazon, whose platforms to date are ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
Leo Apotheker, the Hewlett-Packard CEO ousted so publicly last September, pretty much disappeared from view. Until recently. Now he’s been spotted in Menlo Park and was featured on a conference call with Wall Street analyst Rick Sherlund. Could he be plotting a comeback? Read more »
Scientists have a limitless hunger for computing power and storage. That’s why three European agencies — CERN, the force behind the Large Hadron Collider; the European Molecular Biology Laboratory; and the European Space Agency and supporters — are cooking up a European science cloud. 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 »
When Amazon Web Services launched AWS Storage Gateway last month, the move seemed logical, almost expected. Carlos Escapa, CEO of VirtualSharp Software, argues that the real challenge lies not in restoring data, but in recovering services when disaster strikes. Read more »
Amazon, the market leader, plays at the infrastructure level. But there was a lot of talk at Cloud Connect about Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings, where cloud folks think the real action will ultimately lie. The company will soon have to address these shifts as well as trends ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Systems integrator Dimension Data bought OpSource for its cloud services in June, and is now unveiling the updated cloud offering under its brand. The updated services include a public compute-as-a-service cloud, a private version of same, as well as managed hosting and managed services. 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 service providers are all rushing to claim compliance with the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002. The only problem is that FedRAMP, the federal effort to ensure a safe move to the cloud, won’t sign off on certifications for three or four more months. Read more »
Precise’s Zohar Gilad explains how his company shaved more than $2 million from its annual IT budget by migrating its IT infrastructure and applications to the cloud. Read more »
Game giant Zynga is weaning itself from Amazon’s infrastructure as it moves the bulk of its workloads onto its internal Z Cloud infrastructure. Zynga’s CTO said the company has optimized Z Cloud for its games, so it is more efficient than the public cloud provider. Read more »
Cloud platform-as-a-service provider Heroku has added a new feature to its Postgres database service that lets users share the results of an SQL query simply by sending a URL. The feature, called Data Clips, shows viewers both archived and current result sets in their web browsers. Read more »
Charlie Oppenheimer may be a fan of Amazon Web Services. But, as he explains here, he’s long felt that the economics of the choice between self-hosted and cloud provider had more texture to it than the patently attractive sounding “10 cents an hour.” Read more »
VC power player Kleiner Perkins is reportedly considering a new fund that will be dedicated to cloud computing companies. Whether or not it follows through, KPCB has already backed big-time cloud plays including Zynga and brought a former Twitter exec in as senior partner. Read more »
Arden Realty sells expensive data center to Griffin Capital. The sole tenant, AT&T, gets to continue to enjoy the benefits of leasing the facility in favor of owning it, avoiding the risks of data center ownership such as high taxes, carbon reporting issues and data privacy ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Microsoft’s ambitious Windows Azure cloud is many things — it’s a full-fledged PaaS for developers. But beneath that, it is also a huge pool of foundational storage infrastructure for rent. And in that arena, it could be the only real competitor to Amazon. 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 »
Google is close to announcing its own long-rumored cloud storage service for consumers, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The new Google Drive — which would offer some storage free — would compete head on with existing services like Dropbox. Read more »
Large data centers are increasingly moving to converged infrastructure, and most of the chatter has been about this slick, new hardware. But it also has deep implications for enterprise employees and the CIOS and managers that must retrain them — or do away with them altogether. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
With its Project Lightning server-side flash cache, aka VFcache, EMC hopes to show itself as a forward-looking storage provider. But until it loses its big box, scale-up mentality, it won’t be much of a factor in webscale data centers that go for scale-out everything. 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 »
For the most part, cloud-related laws on the books or in the works right now are almost entirely about data, and data has “gravity.” The more important it is, the more likely services and applications are going to move to the data, rather than vice versa. Read more »
