VMware will spend $1.26 billion to buy software defined networking startup Nicira in a deal that shows how much VMware is counting on its vision of the software defined data center. This is a strategic acquisition of a young technology and startup for the hypervisor giant. Read more »
Remember when there were just two or three cloud computing platforms to choose from, and just about as many cloud databases? Well, as clouds have proliferated, so have the database services built on top of them. Here are the available services and where they’re running. Read more »
A new ARM-based OpenStack cloud comes online this week, courtesy of HP, Calxeda and Canonical. The new “TryStack” facility gives developers who want to test out OpenStack clouds another flavor to try. The news comes out of the OSCON conference this week. Read more »
The new Pat Gelsinger-led VMware must do three things to succeed: Carefully guard against favoring its parent company’s products too much; tend to the crucial virtualization and management technologies that underlie its entire franchise; and be nicer to customers and partners. Read more »
EMC might be smarter than we thought it was. If it handles the rumored spin-out and the Maritz-Gelsinger transition well, the companies under its banner could do great things. Of course, there are a lot of moving parts here and the transition won’t be easy. Read more »
Basho Technologies, the company behind the Riak NoSQL database and the Riak CS cloud storage platform, has raised $11.1 million and has entered into a partnership with data center provider IDC Frontier to distribute its technology throughout Japan. Read more »
In cloud and big data, the second quarter of 2012 featured several high-profile deals and product launches that could reshape the marketplace for everyone. Google and Microsoft launched Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, software-defined networking took off, and all eyes stayed fixed on the continuing promise of data analytics. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Racemi, which specializes in moving business workloads onto and between clouds, snagged $7 million in second-round funding led by Paladin Capital Group and Harbert Venture Partners. The money will fund the expansion of Racemi’s sales, service and engineering efforts. Read more »
As Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer showed off the company’s latest Office software Monday, he hit all the right marks — a touch interface, cloud storage, VoIP integration and social networking tie-ins. They had to. But a very different interface might spook current Office users. Read more »
The number of principal engineers and other technical leaders leaving the company and trying to have big impacts elsewhere suggests VMware might achieve mafia status a la Sun Microsystems, Facebook, Google or PayPal. But is that good news for VMware? Read more »
VMware is planning a corporate shake up and hopes to spin out its platform as a service division and its Greenplum assets into a separate company. The move would help VMware and EMC compete in the PaaS space against Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Read more »
The OpenStack cloud computing project turns two this week. That means the open-source project — which fancies itself the Linux of the cloud — is entering a critical stage of its development process. The opportunity is huge, but the challenges are too. Read more »
Apple took Microsoft to school with its iPod, iPhone, iPad trilogy and Microsoft responded with vows to one-up Apple with Surface and Windows phones. But can the Microsoft of the 21st century do what the older Microsoft did in overcoming foes? Skepticism abounds. Read more »
Two big Amazon outages over the past month certainly got everyone’s attention. Here are three tactical measures cloud users should take to minimize damage from future cloud computing snafus. Broadly, the outages also ratchet up pressure for companies to move to multiple clouds. Read more »
Cloudabilty, the Portland, Ore.-startup that seeks to help companies manage their spending across clouds, just landed $8.7 million in Series A funding. The round was led by The Foundry Group and included contributions from 500 Startups, Trinity Ventures and ad firm Wieden + Kennedy. Read more »
It’s a tough economy out there. That’s why some figures from the new Uptime Institute’s 2012 Data Center Industry Survey might surprise those who would expect spending on data center infrastructure to be cut to the bone. Also, cloud is big, duh. Read more »
With the OpenStack project turning two years old soon amid what will no doubt be a ton of vendor-generated hoopla, Ignacio Llorente wants the world to know that the more mature OpenNebula open-source cloud continues to evolve, just with a lot less noise. Read more »
It looks like Microsoft is serious about becoming the operating system for cloud computing. At its Worldwide Partner Conference on Tuesday, the company announced what amounts to a white-label version of its Windows Azure cloud platform targeting current Windows Server-based web hosts. Read more »
Steve Ballmer, unbowed by a negative Vanity Fair story that paints Microsoft as a company that no longer competes effectively remains … well, Ballmer. In a recent interview, Ballmer said Microsoft will take the battle to Apple again in tablets, in smartphones, in cloud. Read more »
Github, the successfully bootstrapped open source code repository, announced Monday that it has raised $100 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, marking a huge step forward for the popular platform that has become the industry standard for managing and finding code on the web. Read more »
NuoDB has $10 million in Series B funding led by Morgenthaler Ventures and adds database pioneer Gary Morgenthaler to its board. The company will use the funding to widen the beta of its webscale database and get it out broadly this fall. Read more »
You’re ready to launch your cloud service to the rest of the enterprise and migrate applications at a rapid clip. Unfortunately, your enterprise software vendor has a gun pointed at your head and is threatening to derail the whole initiative. This could get ugly. Read more »
Last week’s AWS outage outage might have outsmarted Netflix’s Chaos Monkeys, but the content-distribution giant isn’t about to turn its back on cloud computing. It was a relatively small blip in what has been better availability since the company made the move entirely to the cloud. Read more »
Software as a service is a great for deploying applications across a company. The flip side is that it ends up creating data silos across vendors. Roger Sippl’s Cloud Connection aims to bridge those silos so users can use their data as they see fit. Read more »
Spanish mobile operator Telefónica might be the world’s sixth largest network — but it says that the future could be more about other services, with a strategy to expand its footprint in areas like cloud computing, operating systems and machine-to-machine networks. Read more »
A major limitation of big data is that the technologies used to analyze it are not easy to learn. It doesn’t have to be that way, and technologies like data visualization and cloud-based tools target less-sophisticated users — from business users to receptionists to high school students. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Like it or not, sweeping software bugs are just part and parcel with operating the largest computing systems the world has ever seen. Although Amazon is already fixing the problems that caused its latest outage, this won’t be the last we see. Read more »
VMware has acquired DynamicOps, a Burlington, Mass.-based cloud computing startup that spun out of banking giant Credit Suisse’s IT department in 2008. VMware is touting DynamicOps ability to manage resources running on Hyper-V- and Xen-based hypervisors, and Amazon EC2. Read more »
Sony Computer Entertainment’s $380 million acquisition of cloud gaming provider Gaikai suggests Sony’s future may not be in any piece of proprietary hardware but in a cloud delivery platform that brings PlayStation games to any connected device. Read more »
Managing clouds requires human capital, which will dictate new roles in your organization. Rodrigo Flores, a cloud enterprise architect at Cisco Intelligent Automation, argues that cloud builders who pay particular attention to the people part of the equation will emerge as the true winners. Read more »
This week’s announcement by Google of its new Compute Engine cloud offering is a big deal, but most commentators are missing the real reason Google will get some stalwart Amazon customers to give Compute Engine a try. Performance, not scale, could be Google’s real differentiator. Read more »
Massive thunderstorms notwithstanding, the fact that Amazon’s U.S. East data center went down again Friday night while other cloud services hosted in the same area kept running raises anew questions about whether Amazon is suffering architectural glitches that go beyond acts of God. Read more »
Cloud-based servers simple enough to be at the beck and call of every Joe Schmo are a compelling vision, but presently not a realistic one. At this point, in fact, one could argue that the holy grail of the consumer cloud has already been realized. Read more »
A startup called ThroughPuter has a message for the world’s cloud computing providers: Come talk to us, we can make your cloud fly for serious applications. The company has built a hardware platform designed from ground up to run parallel-processing applications in a multitenant environment. Read more »
Boston picked the brains of a gaggle of IBM engineers who came in to figure out how to consolidate and analyze existing traffic data feeds as well as new data sources including Twitter, to ease the city’s notorious traffic jams. Read more »
In a recent interview, NASA CIO Linda Cureton said the space agency still uses OpenStack for some projects but that it must be pragmatic in all cloud technology choices going forward. Various NASA entities are using Amazon and Windows Azure as needed. Read more »
Two tech conferences took place this week on opposite coasts. One featured storage product updates and cocktails at Fenway Park. The other highlighted augmented-reality glasses and skydivers. One was the Red Hat Summit, the other Google I/O. Guess which was which. Read more »
Google’s new infrastructure-as-a-service offering Compute Engine is a big, big deal in the world of cloud computing. Now that it’s a reality, here are five things I think Google Compute Engine means for the cloud industry. Read more »
Google shared some factoids about the Google App Engine PaaS at Google I/O this week. Most interesting to me is that the company now claims 250,000 active GAE users. That’s up from the 150,000 active users it claimed to date. Read more »
Atlantis Computing thinks that storage is still too expensive and it wants to suck as much of that cost out of your IT infrastructure as possible. It started out attacking desktop virtualization and now sets its sights on storage-intensive server applications like Hadoop. Read more »
