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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 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 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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Amazon is offering customers unprecedented deals to stick with its cloud services. Some big companies can get annual “true up” deals while many report incentives to use reserved, rather than on-demand, instances. And Amazon is making an effort to keep startups in the fold. Read more »
Box will use the $125 million to expand its international presence beyond a new London office, says CFO Dylan Smith. The Series E cash influx led by General Atlantic Partners, brings total funding for the enterprise cloud storage player to a whopping $287 million. Read more »
Netflix has open sourced Chaos Monkey, a service designed to terminate cloud computing instances in a controlled manner so companies can ensure their applications keep running when a virtual server dies unexpectedly. In the past year, Chaos Monkey has terminated more than 65,000 of Netflix’s instances. Read more »
A misconfigured network device caused Windows Azure to crash and burn in Europe yesterday. In a blog post, Microsoft said it is still digging into the root cause of the outage and will report back next week. Read more »
Amazon didn’t wow the street with its Q2 earnings news but the company will definitely keep investing in its cloud infrastructure. For its upcoming quarter, it plans to spend a strapping $800 million to $900 million capex money on technology, said CFO Tom Szkutak. Read more »
Cloud computing and open source software have freed IT practitioners from so much legacy vendor baggage over the past few years. Isn’t it time to free them from inane benchmark boasting, too? A crowdsourced platform where users share their real-world performance experiences could help. Read more »
The popular Google Talk app is down for most users on Thursday morning. This snafu, which cut many people off from their instant messaging/video chat app of choice, along with today’s WIndows Azure snafu in Europe, show the dark side of cloud computing. Read more »
For anyone needing a reminder that no computing cloud is perfect — Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud went down in Europe on Thursday. Few details are available, but Microsoft says it’s on the case. Read more »
For companies wanting to put workloads on a public cloud without having to sweat the details, Appfog has a bold proposition. It says its new PaaS will abstract out all that annoying tweaking and tuning for loads running on Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft or HP clouds. Read more »
Cloud computing is changing the world of microprocessor-chip design. Soon we will see a division between the traditional players (typified by Intel and AMD) and a group of new incumbents (Tilera and others) that offer fresh solutions to make the world’s microprocessor chips as efficient as possible. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
For years, tech vendors built complicated partner programs to sell, support and maintain their stuff and break into new markets. Now Google, Amazon are following suit with new-look partner programs. The goal is to bring new customer business into their respective clouds. Read more »
Benchmarking results from Zencoder show that Amazon Web Services beats out Google’s Compute Engine in a test of a specific CPU-intensive workload. Compute Engine’s performance was hindered by a lack of HPC instances, which Google could one day add. But it’s nice to see real-world comparisons. Read more »
Keen.io the startup that wants to supply the analytics platform for the mobile masses, netted $750,000 in new funding atop the $118,000 it already took in via TechStars. The investors include 500 Startups, Data Collective and SK Ventures, said co-founder Kyle Wild. Read more »
A cadre of OpenStack developers is leaving Rackspace, taking their talents to Nebula, another OpenStack backer. Most of those leaving came to RackSpace via its acquisition of Anso Labs, in February, 2011. Read more »
VMware has made two big acquisitions this month, both focusing in part on the ability to work with competitive hypervisor and cloud computing software. The company seems to get that the future is in making it easy for customers to choose. Read more »
