Tier 3 spiffs up cloud management
More granular cloud management features will make it easier for companies and service providers to set up group policies and lessen server sprawl in their environments, says Tier 3 CTO Jared Wray. Read more »
VMware to join OpenStack: Now what?
VMware’s decision to join the OpenStack Foundation could be a huge or not-so-huge deal. Some see the move as a way to outflank Citrix, others say VMware’s Nicira, DynamicOps buys signaled a desire to at least appear more open in the era of cloud computing. Read more »
Surprise! VMware will join OpenStack
Never say never. VMware is about to join the OpenStack Foundation, a group initially backed by other industry giants as a counterweight to VMware’s server virtualization dominance. Intel and NEC are also on deck to join as Gold OSF members. Read more »
Cloud strategy: Choose wisely
As executives contemplate the emergence of cloud computing, it’s important that they understand the questions they need to ask about why they’d adopt the new IT paradigm. Those deciding should consider the history and decisions made by Borders, the bookstore chain. Its execs chose poorly. Read more »
In cloud storage war, Mover arms developers with data migration tools
Since launching five months ago, Mover, a startup based in Edmonton, Alberta, has picked up thousands of users with data migration service, but the company’s ultimate goal is broader. This week, the startup graduated from Vancouvers’ GrowLab accelerator. Read more »
Rackspace launches cloud monitor
Rackspace CTO John Engates said the company’s new monitoring service, based on its Cloudkick acquisition two years ago, will give customers a better way to monitor the performance of their cloud resources. As more companies consider cloud deployment, tools like these are becoming essential. Read more »
Nutanix raises $33M for a new type of scale out storage
Investors continue throwing money at infrastructure companies, especially if they have a product that helps accomodate and mitigate the complexities of virtualization and scaled out computing infrastructures. Nutanix aims to solve problems in both areas, and investors are rewarding it with $33 million. Read more »
NetApp brings Fusion-io server flash storage into the fold
NetApp is working with Fusion-io to make server-side flash a resource for storing “hot” data. The company said its Flash Accel software can boost application performance up to 90 percent in some cases. Read more »
Startup SimpliVity pitches super-appliance for data centers
Why should mid-market companies deploy multiple data center appliances if one can do the job? That’s the rationale behind SimpliVity’s new OmniCube appliance that merges storage, server, deduplication, and other tasks into one 2U box and can be federated across sites. Read more »
Subscriber Content
The economics of clean-data-center innovation
photo: Facebook
Data centers consume around 1.5 percent of total electricity demand, a figure that’s expected to increase significantly. To cut power and costs tech titans like Google, Apple, and Facebook are cutting electricity use by greening their data centers. But do energy-efficiency gains justify huge capital outlays? Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amazon’s Vogels ponders the new IT metrics: a topic even foggier than the cloud
photo: Pinar Ozger
Comparing the cost of on-demand computing to buying your own infrastructure is one way to look at IT costs in a cloud era, but it’s a shortsighted way to measure how cloud computing can affect your business. Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels outlines another way. Read more »
Europe: Lots of cloud opportunity to tap
photo: Pinar Ozger
European cloud adoption has happened slower than in the U.S., but there are signs that it’s about to rapidly accelerate. At Structure:Europe, cloud luminaries will talk about how they see this change unfolding and what’s motivating it. Hint: It’s not just about saving money. Read more »
How Filepicker lets content flow without worrying about bandwidth
A Y Combinator company called Filepicker.io wants to change the world of accessing cloud-stored content by giving developers the power to connect their apps to everywhere users store content. And because the service deals in URLs rather than files, a slow mobile network won’t kill it. Read more »
Google: App Engine is energy efficient & carbon neutral
Buying IT services should be the opposite of how you buy produce: “No you don’t want to consume your IT locally. Trust us,” says Google’s Peter Magnusson. That’s because products like Google’s platform as a service App Engine are energy efficient and carbon neutral. Read more »
Meet the combo powering Hadoop at Etsy, Airbnb and Climate Corp.
Etsy, Airbnb and the Climate Corporation are all using a combination of Cascading and Amazon Elastic MapReduce to make creating Hadoop jobs as simple as possible. But they’re not the only options for doing so — simplifying Hadoop usage is big business in the IT world. Read more »
Pure Storage scoops up $40M in validation of all-flash push
It’s all-flash, all the time for Pure Storage, the Mountain View startup that just netted another $40 million to pursue that goal. The funding will go toward fueling a global push and staffing up sales and engineering teams, the company said. Read more »
Rackspace launches OpenStack private cloud
Two weeks after launching its public OpenStack cloud, Rackspace follows suit with its private cloud implementation. The availability of both options will make it easier for customers interested in running hybrid cloud for their workloads, the company said. Read more »
Flash is for everyone, says storage startup Skyera
Watch out hard drives — slick startup Skyera, launched by the founder of SandForce, says it really can put flash storage everywhere — without breaking the bank. It’s a bold claim but one that’s backed up with some pretty credible storage expertise. Read more »
Marketing is dead, long live marketing
In the era of cloud computing and big data, chief marketing officers can either sink or swim depending on their ability to recognize the importance of the consumer information available to them and are able to capture and put it to use. Read more »
Red Hat posts OpenStack preview
The company behind the enterprise Linux market leader has now made preview code of its OpenStack cloud platform available for download. The final release is due next year. Rackspace, Internap, HP and others already have OpenStack deployed. Is IBM next? Read more »
Subscriber Content
Understanding and managing the cost of the cloud
While computing in the cloud can cost less than running servers in your enterprise data center, the question of how much less isn’t an easy one to answer. The cloud will get cheaper in the future, but not before these challenges are addressed and overcome. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Startup Stackdriver nets $5M to build cloud management
Many companies want to be able to deploy applications across multiple public clouds, but thus far the management tools to facilitate that have been lacking. That’s a gap Boston startup Stackdriver hopes to fill, say co-founder Dan Belcher. Read more »
Big data VC firm Data Collective steps out of the shadows
Data Collective is a new venture capital firm focusing on seed-round investments in big data startups, from the infraastructure level up to analytics and applications. Among its collection of portfolio companies are Kaggle, MemSQL, Continuuity, Parse, Keen.io, Meteor, MongoHQ, Citus Data and Piston Cloud. Read more »
Microsoft opens Office and SharePoint up to web developers
With the next release of Office and SharePoint, developers can build add-ons that run in Windows Azure (or Amazon, or other clouds.) A bigger question is when Office and SharePoint themselves will make the transition into Microsoft’s multi-billion-dollar cloud. Microsoft still isn’t saying. Read more »
Here’s the cloud computing setup that let you watch Curiosity land
We previously detailed the test architecture that NASA built to ensure the live stream of the Curiosity landing could handle traffic, and now Amazon Web Services is showing what the final architecture looked like. NASA scaled up its test build and monitored traffic in real time. Read more »
The IT world’s love-hate relationship with OpenStack
OpenStack has had a great week with eBay coming out as a user and Rackspace rebranding around the open source cloud project, but life isn’t all good in OpenStack world. There are still plenty of questions over its governance and development models that keep skepticism strong. Read more »
Nimbula, MapR want to give Hadoop a home on your private cloud
Nimbula and MapR say that combining the former company’s scalable private cloud infrastructure with the latter’s Hadoop distribution will enable companies to run and manage big data applications much more easily. The idea is that a cloud infrastructure will make Hadoop much more flexible and available. Read more »
Infochimps makes its big-data-for-developers platform real-time
Infochimps has released version 1.1. of its platform that the company has described as Heroku for Hadoop. The new version takes things a step further, though, turning the platform into an engine for easily creating streaming workflows that don’t require using Hadoop at all. Read more »
HP better not together?
A UBS analyst is calling for the breakup of Hewlett-Packard arguing that the separate parts are way more valuable than the whole. Ironically, that’s the kind of thinking that got former CEO Leo Apotheker booted last year. Read more »
Rackspace rebrands with open cloud mantra
With its OpenStack cloud now ready for its closeup, Rackspace is rebranding itself to emphasize open cloud as opposed to its hosting roots. Company CMO Suaad Sait said the company will continue to stress “fanatical support” as a key differentiator. Read more »
Cloud Foundry loses another exec as David McCrory exits
VMware brain drain continues as Cloud Foundry leader David McCrory takes a new gig at Warner Music. In his blog, McCrory tried to softpedal speculation as to his reasons and pledged to speak at VMworld as planned. Read more »
Local governments could save most from cloud, but are least receptive to it
IT officials in cities and towns are far cooler towards the notion of cloud computing than their peers in state and federal government, according to new IDC research. That’s surprising considering how much they could save by making the move, experts say. Read more »
6 ways to keep your data safe in the cloud
These suggestions might seem like common sense, but the more we use cloud services, the more we put ourselves at risk of identity theft and other negative effects of cybercrime. Here are six ways to at least make it more difficult to steal your data. Read more »
Woz worries about cloud computing
Not everyone is enamored of the notion of cloud computing. Count Apple co-founder and tech icon Steve Wozniak among the skeptics. Woz worries that consumers putting their information into the cloud sign away their rights to it. “I want to own things,” he said. Read more »
iCloud breach highlights some hard truths about the consumer cloud
The hard truth for consumers is that using cloud services means they’re often at the mercy of their cloud providers’ security practices, perhaps even their HR practices. However, unless they’re willing to abstain from the cloud altogether, trusting their providers is often all consumers can do. Read more »
How NASA battle-tested its Mars rover live stream
With millions of viewers expected to watch history Sunday night, NASA couldn’t afford to let the live stream of its Mars rover Curiosity landing go untested. Here’s how NASA put its Amazon Web Services-based infrastructure through its paces to ensure it keeps up with demand. Read more »
Microsoft updates explanation of Azure outage
Microsoft issued a fuller explanation late Thursday for the 2 hour outage that afflicted Windows Azure in Europe a week ago. If vendors want to bring more businesses into their respective clouds they need to be fully forthcoming about operational issues and their causes. Read more »
Investment in K-12 education innovation is soaring, but it’s not all rosy
According to GSV Advisors, an investment firm specializing in education, investments in K-12 education climbed to $389 million in 2011, which is up from $13 million in 2005. But despite massive growth, the sector isn’t without its obstacles. Read more »
Amazon takes aim at IO bottlenecks
High-performance web applications are often hamstrung by sluggish IO. Amazon is now attacking that problem with new Provisioned IOPS block storage volumes and the ability to direct-connect those volumes to select EC2 compute instances over a 1000 Mbit/sec pipe. Read more »
Rackspace CEO: ‘We’re playing a different game’ than Amazon
The Rackspace Cloud is now based fully on the open source OpenStack platform. I recently spoke with CEO Lanham Napier, who discussed how his company doesn’t necessarily see Amazon Web Services as a direct competitor, and how OpenStack is changing his company’s entire business. Read more »
