The IaaS provider, which is a supplier to Europe’s performance-hungry Helix Nebula science cloud, has abandoned magnetic disks for solid-state storage, and all without raising its prices. Read more »
Companies often need to decide between innovation and open standards when they put their data into the cloud. So how can we improve data portability? Read more »
What sort of amazing cloud services could Amazon have up its sleeve? Werner Vogels ain’t saying anything in detail but here are five things to watch out for where the public cloud services giant is concerned. Read more »
Europe’s federated cloud launched this summer is already providing new ways to apply data to solve science and policy problems. It also shows the opportunities that come with combining public data and private partnerships. Read more »
Europe’s Helix Nebula project is addressing the technical, legal, and procedural issues that today make it difficult to seamlessly move jobs from one cloud to another at scale. Lessons learned from it could provide a window through which we can see Europe’s cloud provision taking shape. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Continuing a yearlong trend, the fourth quarter in big IT was all about big data, and Hadoop in particular. Still, many are beginning to recognize the software framework’s shortcomings, which is why this quarter also saw more attention for startups claiming easy analytics and real-time processing. Elsewhere in infrastructure, SaaS startups made out well and valuations for these companies are getting higher, and naturally there was news from the AWS camp. This quarterly wrap-up examines these events and more, including the quarter’s dark spot, the hike in prices in the hard-drive manufacturing space due to the floods in Thailand. Companies mentioned in this report include Calxeda, Heroku, Rackspace, Salesforce.com and Tier3. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Keeping a data center online is a highly complex and often underestimated task, but one that provides the bedrock of any public cloud availability. Patrick Baillie of CloudSigma explains why he thinks public IaaS cloud service providers shouldn’t run their own data centers. Read more »
All startup activity around cloud computing in the past few years has been great, but it also means there’s precious little room on the playing field for newcomers. Here are 10 cloud startups launched in 2011 that have a chance to make it big in 2012. 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 »
There’s a long-running debate in the cloud computing world about whether standard IaaS resources have become true commodities, but it doesn’t look like they’re there yet. Even as prices drop closer to zero across the cloud-provider landscape, there are still plenty of points of differentiation. Read more »
You might have heard of the SuperNAP data center before because of its military-grade security, more-than-400,000-square-foot footprint and roots as Enron’s attempt to build a bandwidth exchange, but the cutting-edge facility is also home to some very interesting customers. Read more »
A long-running clash of legal approaches to the handling of personal data is coming to a head, as European countries begin to act.
In Germany, Deutsche Telekom is calling for more stringent regulation of cloud providers, and in the Netherlands a government minister suggests that U.S. companies could be ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Two markets stand out above all else when looking at the first quarter of 2011: infrastructure as a service (IaaS) — the epitome of cloud computing — and big data. Amazon Web Services continues to lead the IaaS space in terms of customers and innovation, while Rackspace, buoyed by momentum around OpenStack, will be its primary competitor for mainstream customers. In the big data space, there are so many players and terms floating about it’s difficult for outsiders to get a handle on who’s who and what’s what, though such activity validates the technologies. Other developments this quarter included HP’s impending presence in the cloud computing and big data spaces and the realization that Intel won’t be left to die if low-power servers based on x86 processors catch on like the buzz late last year suggests they will. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Microsoft, Cloudera, SeaMicro and Facebook. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Switzerland-based cloud provider CloudSigma opened a U.S. office this week, the first step in what could be a successful attempt to bring its unique brand of cloud computing to the United States. CloudSigma’s “freedom through technology” approach stands out in its resemblance to traditional colocation services. Read more »
