Servicemesh snagged $15 million in initial venture funding from Ignition Partners and Ignition’s Frank Artale will join the board. Four-year-old Servicemesh focuses on helping large companies make sure their cloud service deployments meet governance and compliance policies. Read more »
If the U.S. wants to solve it’s healthcare problem, it should bring the Internet model to bear on it, Microsoft’s chief strategy and research officer said Monday. That means sharing, not segregating data, and using the government’s buying power to mandate change, Craig Mundie said. Read more »
Amazon Web Services on Tuesday beefed up its Cluster Compute family with an extra-large CC2 iteration that packs in two eight-core Intel Xeon processors each connected to a 10-Gigabit network, 60.5 GB of RAM, and 3.37 TB of instance storage. Read more »
Red Hat is bringing more cloud-based automation to Java developers in an update to its OpenShift Platform as a Service which integrates the JBoss tool suite and supports two open-source tools that will shift more of the programming workload to the cloud itself. Read more »
Vyatta, which provides open-source networking software, has raised $12 million in expansion round financing as the entire networking field finds itself on the cusp of big changes. The round, its fifth, was led by HighBAR Partners and brings Vyatta’s total funding to $45 million. Read more »
Boundary, a startup that aims to rethink network monitoring for the cloud, has raised $4.1M. The San Francisco-based startup, founded by Amazon Web Services veteran, Benjamin Black, launches Tuesday with the funding from LightSpeed Venture Partners and a new beta. Read more »
In the past decade supercomputers were dressed-up versions of Intel’s x86 machines, but increasingly supercomputers are borrowing innovations (and silicon in the form of ARM-based chips or DSPs) from the mobile and big data realms to add speed without guzzling too much power. Read more »
Amazon’s shiny Kindle Fire may be the sizzle, but Amazon Web Services — which pair vast compute power and customer behavior data to speed up browsing by anticipating a user’s next move — are the steak, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a Wired interview. Read more »
The latest kerfuffle about alleged vulnerabilities in Amazon Web Services’ Amazon Machine Images is little more than a tempest in a teapot, according to security experts. Their takeaway is basically that stupid users with bad computing practices get what they deserve. Read more »
According to a Harvard Business School professor, cloud startups can thank a copyright law decision for increased funding in the past few years. The case’s timing certainly aligns with an uptick in cloud funding, but it’s tough to see how the two are related. Read more »
With 45 million users, Dropbox is a popular cloud storage service. Consumers use it for photos, documents and other material so they can access it from PCs, phones or other devices. But it’s much more than that, said Drew Houston, founder and CEO of the company. Read more »
Although it appears significant venture capital investment in Platform-as-a-Service startups is drawing to a close, Standing Cloud was able to raise another $3 million, it announced on Thursday. The money comes from Foundry Group and Avalon Ventures, bringing Standing Cloud’s total investment to $8 million. Read more »
Hewlett-Packard, the world’s biggest PC maker, has cycled through a flurry of client device strategies in the past year. Those changes, including the discontinuation of the TouchPad, bred confusion not only about HP’s hardware roadmap but also about its ability to drive future cloud services. Read more »
Virident, the PCIe solid state memory player that competes head to head with Fusion-io, scored $21 million in Series C funding including money from new investors Intel Capital and Cisco Systems, as well as contributions from Sequoia Capital and Artiman Ventures. Read more »
Connectivity changes everything. That’s the credo driving just about every corner of our day-to-day lives. As human beings, we are now connected to one another through not just our social networks but also our cars, the books we read, the albums we download and even our own health and wellness habits (to name just a few areas). With that in mind, GigaOM Pro has singled out certain areas in the technology industry where we see this shift to constant connectivity taking place most drastically. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amazon Web Services is making available a new US West region located in Oregon, which it is positioning as a lower-cost alternative to the company’s existing Northern California region. AWS says services in the Oregon region costs about 10 percent less than in Northern California. Read more »
VMware’s Cloud Foundry is already catching on among companies wanting to become PaaS providers, and now it might start finding a home in private data centers too. ActiveState has created a commercial Cloud Foundry distribution called Stackato that’s meant to give customers their own private PaaS. Read more »
Cloud provider CloudSigma has become the first to add solid-state-drive storage to its public cloud computing service. It’s designed to better CloudSigma’s price-performance ratio overall, which will bring in more and bigger customers that want to do things in its cloud that they can’t do elsewhere. Read more »
Luxtera has developed an optical chip for the data center market that can achieve speeds of more than 100 gigabits per second. That’s the same speed delivered by long-haul networks under the sea, but now harnessed to move big data and deliver cloud computing. Read more »
SaaS startup New Relic made its name monitoring application performance, but it has added server monitoring to the mix to make the service more functional. It’s actually a natural fit, though, as server issues can have a big impact on how an application is running. Read more »
Facebook co-founder (and Harvard dropout) Mark Zuckerberg returned to his alma mater Monday to talk to a few hundred select computer science majors. But first, he did a drive-by for local media, 300 or 400 of which packed the Harvard Yard outside the Lamont Library. Read more »
Rackspace has productized the OpenStack open-source software stack to run in customer data centers. This is an interesting private cloud move for Rackspace, a big cloud provider/managed services provider which now runs customers’ compute loads in its own data centers. Read more »
Minneapolis-based cloud computing startup enStratus has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding to grow its business of managing all types of clouds across a common interface. EnStratus’ technology provides a secure platform for managing and monitoring numerous cloud offerings through a single interface. Read more »
From the perspective of an ISP, making Skype calls on your iPad is far better than doing so on a MacBook Pro, while making calls via an Android handset falls in the middle when it comes to adding to the congestion of the overall network. Read more »
Peer 1, the hosting provider, joins the ranks of Rackspace, GoDaddy and other hosting companies that have decided to get into the cloud. On Monday, it launched its Zunicore service, which combines elements of an Infrastructure-as-a-Service with those of a platform. Read more »
Google, IBM, Citi and a handful of other large U.S. technology and banking companies are pushing the U.S. government to take the lead on establishing global treaties that would assure the free flow of information across international borders. If the government is smart, it will listen. Read more »
The next release of Abiquo’s enterprise cloud management software will integrate with the Chef configuration management tool and sport a customizable user interface. Before moving workloads to the cloud, businesses want the sort of management tools they’re using now in their own data centers. Read more »
If General Motors, a big Microsoft shop, ends up going with Google Apps, it would be a huge validation of Google’s productivity applications in the enterprise. Google Apps targets the Microsoft Office juggernaut, but has had trouble getting traction in big, corporate accounts. Read more »
Yahoo’s magic elixir for web developers frustrated by writing web applications that display on multiple devices is Mojito, a “100 percent” JavaScript application framework and Manhattan, a cloud-based Mojito hosted environment that layers higher-level services atop a basic Node.js server execution engine. Read more »
Is cloud computing ready for government work? Not yet, but a new U.S. Government Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap draft sets out action items that government IT gurus say will speed up the adoption of cloud implementations that are safe and secure enough for government use. Read more »
Scale-out SAN vendor Coraid raised $50 million in additional venture funding in a Series C round led by Crosslink Capital, joined by other new investors Seagate, Kinetic Ventures, and Silverlake AG. That brings Coraid’s total VC take to $85 million in 7 years. Read more »
James Hamilton, VP and distinguished engineer for Amazon Web Services, has some hot tips on building or running a cooler, and more energy-efficient data center. Hamilton, something of a data center rock star, spoke at a recent Open Compute Project event. Read more »
With the public beta of Cloudability’s cloud cost-tracking service, new APIs are available to help customers access their billing and usage information from popular cloud providers including Salesforce.com, Azure, Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. Oh, and if you refer a paying customer, there’s free beer! Read more »
Viber Media, provider of iPhone and Android apps that let users talk and text for free over 3G and Wi-Fi networks, is built upon a foundation of the MongoDB NoSQL database running atop the Amazon Web Services cloud. Read more »
Can ARM wrestle its way into the server market? Calxeda and HP think so. On Tuesday Calxeda launched its EnergyCore ARM server-on-a-chip (SoC), and the world’s largest server maker committed to building EnergyCore-based servers that will consume as little as 5 watts total. Read more »
WeVideo is launching a new product that will enable organizations to use its collaborative editing products in the cloud. The WeVideo Commercial product is aimed at bloggers, journalists, marketers and other creators who wish to easily edit, manage and publish videos from a single online platform. Read more »
Huawei is planning to boost its cloud offerings on the software side through acquisitions, but thanks to the uncertain politics related to the Chinese government, U.S. startups may not be in the running. Read more »
Microsoft started moving Photosynth, it’s cool immersive camera application, to the Microsoft Azure platform-as-a-service earlier this month. And that marks the beginning of a flow of Microsoft legacy apps — many of which it already hosts but not on Azure — over to its full-fledged PaaS. Read more »
SolidFire, which wants to bring all-solid-state storage to cloud providers serving you, raised an additional $25 million in venture capital bringing its total to $37 million. New investors in this second round include Data Domain veterans as well as former Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopolous. Read more »
The Open Compute Foundation’s new board of directors includes a big name from Intel, but not from AMD. And, Open Compute Project members so far include Dell but not HP. What vendors are in or out is of interest to data center pros. Read more »
